LA TRINIDAD, Benguet, Philippines -- President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo made a strong pitch for her administration’s poverty mitigation agenda by citing on Black Saturday Benguet’s ability to provide enough vegetables to the market.

The President breezed through this valley on Saturday morning to harvest lettuce in a vegetable farm and to pick strawberries in a bid to inspire local farmers, boost tourism and enhance vegetable production.

"There is abundance of vegetable production in the Cordilleras," she said.

The President said it was high time the local vegetable industry hit pay dirt by cashing in on the production of processed vegetables for higher value.

She announced the launching of the "study of the manufacture of processed vegetables" to afford farmers more opportunities to earn income beyond the wet and retail markets.

She cited "veggie noodles" now being made by Benguet State University (BSU) here.

"Vegetable-fortified noodles will make them more nutritious and delicious and low cost to manufacture in this era of soaring wheat prices," she said.

The towns of La Trinidad, Atok, Tublay, Bakun, Buguias and Kibungan are the province’s major producers of cabbage, potatoes, carrot, chayote, celery, lettuce and other highland vegetables.

The Department of Agriculture in the Cordillera has estimated the value of the industry, which supplies close to 70 percent of the demand for vegetables in Metro Manila, at P12 billion a year.

This town is also the country’s strawberry capital. The combined fresh fruit and processed strawberry industry has reached P50 million a year, according to the municipal agriculture office.

To further enhance the chances of local vegetables in the market, Arroyo said locally processed vegetables, like the "veggie noodles," would become part of the stock of the government’s "Tindahan Natin" program.

The program, she said, "had a substantial allocation in this year’s national budget because in the Tindahan Natin, the staples we sell are rice and veggie noodles."

The President gave Dr. Rogelio Colting, BSU president, a P10 million check to jump-start a "veggie noodles" manufacturing project in the university.

She urged BSU to concentrate on vegetable noodles as its research and development mandate.

In recognizing the role of "veggie noodles" in the government’s food security thrust, she said: "Vegetable noodles with raw materials can be sourced from the salad bowl of the Cordillera and the pinakbet (Ilocano vegetable dish) bowl of Pangasinan, including Villasis and the other towns of Pangasinan."

Villasis town in Pangasinan is among the top producers of eggplant in the country.

She said the project could be a joint undertaking of the Cordillera and Ilocos regions.

"But the head researcher and incubator would be the BSU," she said. "Vegetable noodles would improve the income of farmers and solve storage problems of what are by nature quickly perishable items."

She urged BSU to partner with the private sector, particularly local vegetable processors and vegetable noodle makers, to push the project.

The move, she said, would boost the local vegetable industry’s potential to become a micro industry and small to medium enterprise.

She cited several entrepreneurs that the local vegetable industry could tie up with for the production of processed vegetables.

Among them are the Dizon family and Jose "Joey" Concepcion, chair and chief executive officer of RFM Corp.

Ms Arroyo urged BSU to link its research center with Concepcion for the technological aspect of commercial production, the DA to ensure supply through technical assistance, the Presidential Management Staff (PMS) to ensure credit assistance, and the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) for marketing concerns.

She also cited the Chan family of the Liwayway Marketing Corp., maker of Oishi snack products, as a potential investor since the family is into the "production of veggie-based and veggie-added snacks and noodles."

Arroyo said she was confident that there were other companies who would surely "invest in any national project that would feed our children, help the farmers, and give our consumers more and better nutritional choices."