Philippine Business Magazine: Volume 9 No. 3 - Cover
Fruits of Farming

More Challenging
Talking about the sector as a whole, Bacani elaborates that agriculture is much more challenging than industry because there are more variables in agribusiness. He elaborates that, “When you are dealing with something living, you cannot just neglect it. You have to nurture it properly with the right inputs and care so that whatever you get is maximized. It is more satisfying when you see something living, growing, and producing some value. If you do not love what you are doing, it would be difficult, for example, to go to Mindanao every so often. I fly to Mindanao every other week. When I was with DOLE, I lived in Mindanao. You cannot manage by remote control. You have to walk the farms because it is relatively complicated as compared to a factory. When you run factories, you just buy raw materials to use and just depend on a lot of machinery to churn out the final product. In the fresh business, you are not even sure when you will get the raw material because you are still growing it.”

Bacani points out that agribusinesses should integrate to gain economies of scale. “If you have to compete in the world, you have to look at the whole system from seed-to-shelf – improve the productivities in the different areas of the chain, and then integrate the whole thing. Fact is, buyers are getting bigger; even the supermarket chains are consolidating to have very efficient purchasing and logistics systems. They would rather talk to fewer people who can give them volume and service. Worse, if you are small, you will not have any bargaining leverage – you will just be a price-taker.”

Seed-to-Shelf
Presidential Adviser on Job-Creation in Agriculture Luis Lorenzo Jr. cannot agree more with Bacani in the need to apply the “seed-to-shelf” formula on agricultural processes. Lorenzo’s battlecry for the sector’s upliftment calls for using international best standards in improving processes from the time that seeds are prepared to the time the farm produce are sold in the market. Lapanday Farms, which his family owns, has indeed, for years now, epitomized farm production processes which are at par with the world’s best.