Cargill to support coconut farmers in Yolanda-hit areas

INQUIRER NORTHERN LUZON FILE PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines—Nearly five months after Super Typhoon “Yolanda” nearly levelled everything in its path, one international agriculture company is set to lend a helping hand to those knocked down to their feet.

Cargill Philippines is set to help coconut planters in Eastern Visayas, the area that “Yolanda” struck the hardest, get back up to normalcy and to improve the region’s production of copra.

Deepak Gupta, Business Unit Leader, Grains and Oilseeds Supply Chain Asia Cargill Singapore, said that they are willing to support local farmers in producing copra in Eastern Visayas once the latter expresses the intention to join the program.

“Cargill started in the Philippines in the copra business in 1947,” Gupta said whose new corporate social responsibility is only fitting to the company’s origins.

“Farmers need to experience the economic benefit of growing copra,” Gupta said. “We also produce copra in other countries and we take the best practices from one country to another.”

Gupta said that local farmers, who would join the program, are not required to sell the copra to Cargill but to the market of their choice.

Cargill, on its part, could export quantities of copra to the United States and Europe with the farmers themselves benefitting from the profits of the raw materials.

According to the company, “Yolanda” ravaged 441, 517 hectares of land and within the area were some 33 million coconut trees, 15 million of which were utterly destroyed.

Cargill Philippines president Philip Soliven said that after the typhoon, the ripple effect reached the US and Europe.

To start from the ground up, Cargill would provide farmers with 600 hectares to produce not only coconut but also other cash crops like corn in between the trees, while waiting for the trees to produce the fruit, to start the development.

Soliven added that they would provide 35,000 seedlings for the farmers as their start-ups.

“Cargill does not work in isolation,” Soliven said. “These are established sources of income for the farmers.”

 
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