TACLOBAN CITY-The regional office of the Department of Agriculture (DA) is slated to conduct series of training and seminars for corn farmers from the selected municipalities in Eastern Visayas. The said activities are corn and cassava production training-cum-post harvest promotion and technology demonstration, a three-day agricultural extension workers (AEWs) training on cassava for food processing and corn husk utilization, and post-Yolanda rehabilitation on cassava production technology training-cum-post harvest promotion and technology demonstration.
These will be conducted starting September until November this year in different sites in the region, namely, Javier and Barugo, Leyte; Borongan City in Eastern Samar; San Isidro and San Roque, Northern Samar; and St. Bernard, Southern Leyte. The series of seminars, aimed at improving the capacity of farmers and other stakeholders involved in corn production, will be participated by farmers and other agricultural advocates from the identified areas. In the course of implementation, experts and technical staff from the Agricultural Training Institute – Regional Training Center 8 (ATI-RTC 8) will serve as resource persons and facilitators.
Aiming to continuously re-educate and establish mechanisms to capacitate the AEWs in communicating and bringing down the latest technologies to farmer-clientele, capacity-building activities will also be conducted. Retooling courses on corn production technologies cum post-harvest promotion and technology demonstration will be held on October 6 – 7, 2014 at the Visayas State University, Baybay City. Moreover, the training on corn husk utilization will be conducted on October 8 – 10, 2014 at the same university. Meanwhile, in support of the recovery interventions for farmers affected by the supertyphoon Yolanda, DA will provide one bag of corn seeds per hectare to farmers in the municipalities of Calubian and Leyte, in Leyte; Salcedo, Eastern Samar; Basey, Samar; Silago, Southern Leyte; and Naval, Biliran. Juanito Baring, regional corn program coordinator, said that he is hoping that these activities and other programs will help achieve the food security goal of the department and more importantly, boost the morale of farmers affected by the typhoon to continue farming.
Eastern Visayas’ corn sector lost some P97 M or 5,352 MT from Supertyphoon Yolanda, affecting 5,722 farmers, cultivating 3,875 hectares. (JOHANNES PAULUS CASIS, LNU Intern)
