DAVAO CITY—The Philippines is currently
negotiating with Italy to finance its product traceability project, a strategic
food safety and marketing effort to assure prime markets like Europe and the US
of the bio-safety origins of their food exports.
As of Wednesday, Italy was willing to take as
much as €2.9 million in a debt-swap scheme with the Philippines, said Renea
Cruz, the Filipino consultant of the United Nations Industrial Development
Organization (Unido).
The amount will be used to acquire software to
record and report all activities in the food chain, from the farm up to the
loading of the products for export, Cruz said. Part of the amount would also go
to training the needed human resources among companies and industries, as well
as to help defray any financial requirement to install the traceability
mechanism.
She said that the Philippines was testing the
traceability design on five food export products—banana, pineapple, coconut,
mango and tuna—where the monitoring and reporting concept would be less of a
problem with big industries, she said.
“We would be training and persuading the small
farmers and growers in these industries to adapt to this new system of
reporting because ultimately, this would redound to their benefit anyway.
Besides, we will tell them that this is the current real market requirements
and we would like to be ahead in the market,” she added.
With the Philippines refining the design under
the program called Philippine Traceability for Revitalized Agricultural
Competitiveness Enhancemenor P-Trace, “it is now ahead in Asia,” she said.
Egypt was the first country to install its own
program called Traceability Center for Agro-Industrial Exports or E-Trace in
2004, and its central monitoring and tracing center was embedded in its
Ministry of Trade and Industry, Cruz said.
In the Philippines, the implementing agency
would be the Department of Trade and Industry, supported by the Department of
Finance and the National Economic and Development Agency.
The Unido has taken up with exporting
countries to install a clear traceability system of its agricultural and
industrial food exports after Europe and the US enacted the traceability of all
food items from their traders and business owners, including their export
partners.
The requirement by these countries emanated
from their bioterrorism concern. Their anxiety prompted their governments to
put more sophisticated requirements for market access, according to a program
information released by the DTI during the meeting of the five identified
industry clusters with representatives of the Unido at the Marco Polo Hotel
here on Wednesday.
The two major importing markets “need to be
assured that the products they will export are safe for consumption,” the
program information said, adding that the traceability system would need all
the information in the entire food chain, from the origin of the products to
the middle traders, to handling and processing, and up to shipping for export.
Alaa Fahmy, director of the E-Trace Center in
Cairo, Egypt, said he would take up with the five industry representatives “on
the experience of Egypt, at how it has increased its export immediately after
we installed the traceability mechanism.”
“Our businesses and industries and our
government expressed the same concerns that your businesses here have expressed
when we started the program there,” he said, citing the apprehension that local
businesses may not be able to afford the competition posed by the more well-off
and well-positioned businesses in the more developed economies.
He said Egyptian farmers and industry leaders
were also concerned that the bioterrorism origin of the market requirement put
up by Europe and the US may unduly expose the country’s production weakness and
capacities among local farmers.
“These are the same concerns that your
Filipino industries have also expressed when Unido began to talk with your
officials and industry leaders,” he added.
“But we are also here to help your industries
finally refine the design and begin your own implementation so that you can
also enjoy the benefits of the program in terms of easier access to the markets
and preferential treatment of your products,” he said.
MANUEL T. CAYON
Business Mirror
Business & Investment Opportunities
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