Cebu traders urged to explore food exports
Local exporters are encouraged to consider exporting more food and food ingredients.
Fred Escalona, Philexport Cebu executive director, gave this advice after a report from Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) showed a further slow down of the export performance of the electronics sector.
The report said the July book-to-bill ratio of the electronics exports slipped from 1.2 percent in March to 0.87 percent. This figure represents the ratio between the value of orders for export goods and the value of previous deliveries.
Escalona said while other export sectors were still struggling to recover, global demand for the food and food ingredients sector continued to be strong.
He proposed that exporters look into developing the coconut as a food ingredient for export.
He said Philexport was studying how to develop this potental after the organization received fund assistance recently from the Dutch government.
“From coconut you can already get four food ingredients like Virgin Coconut Oil, sugar, flour and coconut water that we can export. And we have a lot of coconuts here,” Escalona said.
He said coconut water was already a popular food product with global demand growing.
Coconut water falls under the naturally healthy category, which accounted for almost 40 percent of total global health and wellness sales of US$223 billion in 2009.
For Virgin Coconut Oil, Escalona said global market analysts were seeing more growth in demand for the tropical juice drink especially in Brazil and other tropical countries like Ecuador, Indonesia, India and Malaysia where the drink was considered a local beverage.
He said that the gifts, toys, and houseware sector was also a promising sector compared to the furniture sector.
“All these sectors are affected by consumer spending which at present is also affected by the economic turmoil in our two major markets,” he said.
“What we would suggest is to tap new markets like India and study the market with regards to what products are much in demand there,” Escalona said.
In the first quarter this year, the value of coconut water exports rose by 260.55 percent to $1.32 million, said Euclides Forbes of the Philippine Coconut Authority.
Forbes said the Philippines sold 4.49 million liters of coco water in the first quarter which was a 300-percent jump from the 1.12-million liters sold in the same period last year.
The United States, which was the main market for the coco water, bought 3.72 million liters in the first three months of the year.
Escalona said Cebu exporters should now start looking at these new opportunities while looking at new markets to trade with.
