PLANT coffee and earn! National Coffee Development Board (NCDB) co-chairperson Pacita Juan advises farmers to go back to planting coffee, the price of which has shot up by nearly 400 percent.

“Before, we launched an awareness campaign to generate sales. Now, we need to focus on increasing the number of producers,” Juan told the BusinessMirror on Tuesday.

Juan, who is also president and chief executive of Figaro Coffee Co., said these are the good times for coffee as a beverage as well as a commodity.

She said that Robusta, the major bean that the Philippines exports, has gone up to P114 a kilo from just P28 in the past six months. “The shift in investments to commodities, with the fallout in the financial markets, has pushed coffee back into the limelight,” Juan said.

“This is an opportunity for Filipino farmers, for those in the coffee business. We shouldn’t wait for other countries like China to gain the initiatives.”

The NCDB, Juan added, is embarking on a campaign to promote planting coffee beans.

Juan said increasing consumption and steady supply for coffee were the drivers of prices.

According to the International Coffee Organization (ICO) price monitoring data, the prices of coffee hit $114.12 a pound in end-April after opening at $98.91 in January.

“Dynamic world consumption patterns and the continued balance between supply and demand make it likely that current price levels will be maintained,” the ICO said in its latest report.

Consumption of coffee has increased to 917,000 bags in 2006 from 825,000 bags in 2002, the ICO report noted.

Still, based on per capita consumption, the Philippines is just a notch above Indonesia of the top 19 countries that the ICO monitored for its March 2008 report.

Per capita consumption of coffee remained steady at 0.52 kilograms since 2002.

The Philippines, once one of the world’s largest coffee exporters, continues to be a net importer of coffee, buying an average 30,000 metric tons annually, which is half the country’s coffee requirements.

Figaro Foundation estimates 175,000 hectares of land is planted with coffee. Out of this total, the foundation estimates only 80,000 hectares remain productive, mostly in the highlands of Batangas, Cavite, Bukidnon, Benguet, Kalinga-Apayao, Davao and Claveria.

According to the latest ICO report, exports from the Philippines has dropped to a thousand bags in March 2008 compared with 3,514 bags in the same month last year.

THE unabated increase in oil and food prices has forced the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) to revise its growth targets for the next two years downward, according to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).

THE Export Development Council (EDC) is now targeting to submit to Malacańang for approval the new three-year Philippine Export Development Plan (PEDP) by the middle of the year with six new key challenges being taken into consideration.

THE national government and the Japanese government are now in the process of creating a medium-term framework that will serve as a blueprint for Japan’s assistance to the Philippines in the next five years, according to the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda).

THE province of Saskatchewan in Canada will need 10,000 to 12,000 Filipino skilled workers to fill in the increasing demands of its labor market in the next five years, says its top official visiting the Philippines.

THE Department of Agriculture (DA) has lifted the temporary ban on all imports of domestic and wild birds, along with poultry and its products from the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, following official confirmation showing that the avian influenza (AI) virus in the prairie area no longer exists in the last three months.

THE Philippine government expects to save up to $500 million annually from rice imports with the rice self-sufficiency master plan it has rolled out.

PLANT coffee and earn! National Coffee Development Board (NCDB) co-chairperson Pacita Juan advises farmers to go back to planting coffee, the price of which has shot up by nearly 400 percent.

IT”S school time again! Some may be a little sad that the end of summer is fast approaching, while others just can’t wait to go back to school and look forward to new things: social scenes, teachers, classmates and friends.