PCAARRD and the Local Government Unit of Los Baños (LGU-LB) partner in a program titled “Enhancing gender-sensitive sustainable agriculture and aquatic S&T-based livelihood enterprises in Los Baños: PCAARRD and LGU-LB collaboration”.
The two agencies, through their gender and development focal point systems, aim to provide economic opportunities and additional income sources for the constituents of Los Baños through the program.
The program focuses on enhancing gender-sensitive, S&T-based livelihood enterprises on organic vegetable and tilapia production. It focuses on empowering men and women through skills development on organic agriculture and tilapia cage culture farming, organic nutrient farm inputs making, and packaging and marketing of products to enhance community entrepreneurship and networking.
The program also highlights the significant role of women in contributing to the household income. Women, equal with men, can enjoy the benefits from wealth-creating opportunities such as production, processing and marketing of vegetables and tilapia in Los Baños. However, they need access to technological trainings and high value productive resources such as credit, loans, or financial assistance. The key is to mainstream women in the process of economic development in the rural areas of Los Baños.
Growing of vegetables provide growers with regular and continuous source of food and cash to meet their basic needs. The current volume of vegetable produced in Los Baños already caters to the demands of the local population however, the market can still be expanded for organically grown vegetables. Auxiliary industry such as production of organic fertilizer can also be established from the surplus vegetables in the market. The demand for organic vegetables is increasingly being recognized given its potential benefits to health.
The grow-out production of tilapia, considered being the “aquatic chicken”, provides many advantages to the resource-poor farmers since it both gives food for the family and raises income.
The program commenced with an inception meeting and memorandum of agreement ceremonial signing held at the Municipal Hall of Los Baños held recently.
The inception meeting addressed the need to level off the expectations among project teams and PCAARRD. Specifically, it was intended to assist the project teams in polishing the proposals; fine-tune the project implementation strategies; and discuss administrative concerns.