MANILA, Philippines - Corporate Holdings Management, Inc. (CHMI) is working on a plan to develop 4,000 hectares of land for coffee plantations in the next five years and is keen on developing sites in San Mateo and Antipolo City as sites for plantations nearest to the metropolis.
Noel S. Gonzales, CHMI founding chairman and CEO, is an investment banker who has been engaged for years in real estate development.
"Our plan is to cover 4,000 hectares in a five-year period through the help of the government and banking sector and in partnership with Nestle as buyer. At present, we were able to plant 333 coffee trees covering 200 hectares in Cebu within only five months and now we are preparing 300 hectares more for planting. We are also eyeing Antipolo and San Mateo as new sites for coffee production," he revealed.
Aside from Gonzales, Simeon L. Kintanar, president of CHMI Agroforest Development Corp., said his company also partnered with the community in Alcoy, Cebu to cultivate coffee trees and eventually make Cebu as the coffee corridor in Central Visayas.
Nestle is the country's biggest buyer of coffee cherries and it has been engaged in attracting farmers agribusiness companies to dabble with coffee, the most consumed beverage on the planet next to water.
Nestle Philippines chairman and CEO John Miller attended a recent coffee forum and vowed to support the industry.
Agriculture Secretary Proceso J. Alcala has also called on private companies to work on coffee and promised a package of incentives to lure more entrepreneurs to establish plantations, with the Department of Agriculture (DA) setting up 21 coffee processing facilities from Cordillera down to Mindanao to support them.
These facilities, to be built within five years, would cost P4.9-million each.
Marriz Manuel B. Agbon, who heads the National Convergence Initiative (NCI) of the DA, Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR)and acts as president of the Philippine Agricultural Development and Commercial Corp. (PADCC) said NCI is identifying specific coffee clusters in each province and identified Northern Mindanao, Davao, and SOCSARGEN (South Cotabato, Sarangani, General Santos City) as accounting for a maximum of 52 percent of the country's coffee production.
Dante S. Delima, program director of DA-High Value Crops Development Program said his office is committed to develop the coffee industry and has allotted P50 million for robusta production this year for some of the 10 priority regions.
Delima said 70 percent of coffee produced in the Philippines is Robusta variety, one of the most popular and commercial varieties of coffee.
Other coffee varieties cultivated in the country are arabica (aromatic), liberica (kapeng barako), and excelsa (bitter).
He stressed the importance of quality and affordable planting materials for mass propagation of coffee.
Financing programs for coffee growers and investors through the assistance of Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP) and Banco de Oro (BDO) were discussed by Liduvino Geron, Land Bank 1st VP for the agrarian and domestic banking sector and Rhoda Orsolino, BDO senior VP for Commercial Banking Group (Luzon), respectively.
"We are prepared to fund new coffee plantations and the rehabilitation of existing areas for coffee. We are also ready to finance irrigation systems if needed. Borrowers are also allotted a grace period to repay the loan until cashflow is generated," said Geron.
"For our part, BDO's support to agriculture and fisheries is now slowly picking up. Our bank is open to individual borrowers provided they can comply with all the requirements of the bank which are needed to secure their ability to repay the loan," explained Orsolino.
On tax incentives for coffee investors provided by the Board of Investments (BOI) under the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Guillermo S. Laquindanum, director, Supervision and Monitoring Department, discussed the simplified procedures for investors who would like to avail of tax incentives.
"Investments in agribusiness or agriculture and fisheries commercial production and processing are at the top of our Investment Priority Plan (IPP)," he said.
