Part Two
FILIPINOS love to eat meat.
And with a growing economy comes an increasing purchasing power—meaning, there would be more chicharon, bulalo, sinigang, lechon and, maybe, even kebab on a Filipino’s plate today.
In fact, Filipinos’ annual consumption of meat has almost doubled in the past two decades.
The Philippines’s current meat consumption is at 28.7 kilograms per capita (kg/capita), nowhere near than the 1993-recorded 15.47 kg/capita, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show. The 1993 annual meat consumption reflects the current poultry-meat consumption per year of Filipinos.
The Filipinos’ palate for other sources of protein, such as beef and mutton, has been continuously growing.
Filipinos’ annual consumption of beef has remained in the 3 kg/capita area since breaching that level in 1999. The OECD data show that the Philippines has a 3.02 kg/capita, way higher than the 1.69 kg/capita recorded in 1994.
The same is observed with the relationship of Filipino taste buds and mutton. From a 0.378 kg/capita of mutton registered in 1993, the Philippines’s annual consumption of mutton has played in the 0.50+ kg/capita zone since 2008, OECD data show. Today, an average Filipino eats 0.504 kg of mutton a year.
The country’s annual consumption of beef and mutton translates to a yearly requirement of 440,000 metric tons (MT) of beef and 58,600 MT of mutton, OECD data shows.
In order to meet the growing demand of Filipinos for protein sources, such as the meat of ruminant animals (cattle, goat and sheep), the Department of Agriculture (DA) started a series of importation program in a bid to develop local ruminant animal industries in the Philippines eight years ago.
Breeding
NEARLY a decade ago, the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI), an attached agency of the Department of Agriculture (DA), moved to develop ruminants. Called Animal Genetic Infusion Projects (Agip), the program has facilitated four importation projects to develop local ruminant industries by infusing new blood-lines from America and Australia.
“The overall direction for the ruminant industry is to build the population base [through importation and use of technologies], increase animal productivity [through introduction of quality genetic materials], and lay the groundwork for sustainable development,” the BAI said.
The first importation program was called “Accelerating the Genetic Resource Improvement Program for Beef Cattle and Small Ruminants”, or Agripbes. The program was launched in 2008 through a P399.90-million assistance funding from the United States through its US Public Law 480.
Agripbes aims to ensure the continuous breeding of purebreds and genetically superior animals in the country by infusing new bloodlines to existing breeding farms under a repayment scheme. The BAI would be selecting certain breeds of ruminant animals from the US to be procured and imported to the Philippines.
The BAI expects a domino effect of breeding through Agripbes.
Once the proper animals were selected, they will undergo a week or two of quarantine period in the US. Afterward, they will be imported to the Philippines after a successful bidder has been awarded the contract for the said importation by the BAI. The imported animals would stay in government quarantine areas for 30 days, with the winning bidder shouldering the costs. After which, they are distributed to identified qualified farmers.
Repayment
UPON receiving the imported breed of ruminant, the recipient-farmer must repay outright at least two ruminant animals for one imported buck (either goat or sheep) he or she received. The recipient can pay from existing stock or an offspring of the imported breed throughout the program duration.
In principle, the ruminant animals that served as “repayment”—especially the offspring of the imported breed animal—were then given to the next line of Agripbes recipients. Recipient-farmers are selected by regional BAI coordinators, some of whom are also owners of a multiplier farm, from academe, local government unit or an interested livestock grower with capabilities. The first tranche of 1,800 imported ruminant animals were delivered from 2010 to 2013 in seven batches and were later on distributed to 16 regions. This tranche was composed of 1,200 heads of goat (351 boer, 308 Anglo Nubian, 59 Toggenburg, 131 Saanen, 346 Alpine and five La Mancha breeds) and 600 heads of sheep (145 Katahdin, 371 Dorper and 84 Saint Croix breeds).
Since the first tranche in 2010, the program has reached a third line of recipients. There were 249 Agripbes first line recipients or the ones who directly received the first wave of imported ruminant animals, according to BAI data.
Importation
BAI data show that as of December 31, 2015, a total of 1,690 repayment animals from the first-line recipients were given already to 565 second-line recipients in 17 regions. So far, 142 repayment ruminant animals from the second-line recipients were distributed to 66 third-line recipients. All in all, these bring the total Agripbes-beneficiaries to 880, with total count of 3,632 ruminant animals distributed.
In 2014 Agripbes ventured into the second phase of the animal importation program for cattle.
The BAI earlier targeted an importation of 1,200 breeder heifers. But due to expensive cost of the cattle from the US, the number was reconfigured to 1,000 heads. Another reconfiguration was done—still due to expensiveness of cattle—in mid-2014 before the importation was green-lighted by then-Agriculture Secretary Proceso J. Alcala.
A total of 78 heads of beef cattle (70 heifers and eight bulls) and 910 heads of sheep (258 rams and 652 ewes) of various breeds were procured. A contract was awarded to General Mercantile Corp. in a joint-venture agreement with Ebenezer Goat Farm. The said ruminant animals were selected in November 2015 and successfully arrived in the Philippines mid-December last year.
Insemination
AFTER a quarantine period in January, the procured animals for the second phase of Agripbes were distributed to various farms in the country. Sixteen of 17 farm recipients of the second sheep importation were delivered to 13 government stock farms and three were sent to the Central Luzon State University.
Meanwhile, recipients of 78 heads of cattle were all from government stock farms (GSFs).
On top of the live animal importation, Agripbes also procured 10,000 semen doses of cattle of different breeds from the US, which could be tapped through the Unified National Artificial Insemination Program (Unaip).
According to the implementing guidelines approved on March 17, 2015, about 4,000 doses of the total imported semen should have been used for the breeding season this year. The BAI said GSFs were supposed to have been given 1,720 doses, while the rest should have been provided to private farms.
The BAI also said another 833 doses will be utilized by the participating farms in the succeeding breeding seasons until 2020. A thousand doses will be used for sire linkage, while the remaining 2,145 doses will serve as on-stock for the continuity of the BAI’s flagship project, the Genetic Improvement Program (GIP).
Goats
THROUGH another P475 million worth of funding assistance from USPL480, the BAI started in 2010 another ruminant animal-infusion project called the “Goat Production Project for An Accelerated Hunger Mitigation Program”, or the GPP-AHMP.
The GPP-AHMP sourced 1,430 heads of breeder goats (1,300 head does and 130 head bucks) from America and another 2,115 heads of breeder goats locally (2,115 head does and 500 head bucks).
The importation component of the GPP-AHMP earlier aimed to procure 6,480 heads of breeder goats (6,000 head does and 480 head bucks) but it was reconfigured due to high cost to the current goat count of 1,430 heads.
The repayment scheme of the GPP-AHMP is the same with that applied for Agripbes. The locally sourced breeder goats were already distributed in 2014 with a total number of beneficiaries reaching 711 farmer-recipients (433 for breeder does and 278 for breeder bucks).
The collection and distribution of repayment animals of the locally purchased goats to prospective farmer recipients started in the third quarter of 2016.
Poverty
AS for the imported goats, the BAI Bids and Awards Committee is currently on postevaluation of the winning bid in December 2015. The imported goats composed of Anglo Nubian, Alpine and Boer Breeds is proposed to be distributed to different nucleus farms of the government and academe.
According to BAI data, the estimated number of recipients of the GPP-AHMP is 378. The GPP-AHMP was the materialization of the DA’s commitment to the government’s program of mitigating hunger and reducing poverty incidence in the country back in 2007.
“The project helped in increasing the number of goat raises. An increase in number of raisers [with the assumption of more animals being raised] will be also increase the supply of goat and sheep meat in the market,” the BAI said in its 2015 Accomplishment Report. “This, in turn, will help them out of constant hunger and poverty.”
To date, the country’s goat population has reached 3.71 million heads, according to latest data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA). PSA data also show that goat production in 2015 increased to 77,480 (MT) live weight, from 76,100 in 2014.
Heifers
THE third importation program of the BAI was the “Expanded Breeder Cattle Lease Ownership Program”, or E-BClop. This program aimed to revitalize and sustain local cattle production by introducing high-grade and purebred animals with quality genetic materials at both small hold farmers and multiplier cattle raisers to ensure their continued access to genetics. Like the GPP-AHMP, E-Bclop had local and imported components.
The program started in 2014 and ends this year. It resulted to the procurement of 1,342 heads of cattle from Australia.Of the figure, 760 head of purebred commercial Brahman-breed heifers were distributed to the Federation of Cattle Raisers Association of the Philippines (FCRAP), a local cattle organization. The remaining heads were distributed to GSFs.
As for the local component of the project, 800 heifers were purchased and equally distributed across 16 regions. The BAI estimates at least 449 E-Bclop recipients. About
286 of them received locally purchased cattle, while the remaining 163 are recipients of the imported ones. The E-Bclop project is currently on its final phase, which is the collection and distribution of repayment animals. This phase is expected to start next year, according to documents provided by the BAI.
Mutton
THE last importation program that the BAI conceptualized was the Mutton Development Project (MDP). The MDP, which was conceived and approved in 2015, aimed to procure 3,409 heads of commercial meat-type sheep to develop the mutton industry and sheep production in the country.
The E-Bclop and MDP were Philippine government-funded projects through the DA’s National Livestock Program (NLP). Under the NLP, the DA allotted P200 million for E-Bclop (P40 million for the local component and P160 million for the foreign component) and P124.48 million for the MDP.
“Even if there’s only around 6 percent of commercial ruminant animal growers in the country and the rest, of which more than 93 percent are backyard farmers, we closely work hard with the industry,” Agip Overall Project Manager Paul Limson told the BusinessMirror.
To be concluded