Villar to farmers: “Join farm tourism bandwagon”
P100k EARNINGS GUARANTEED
MANGALDAN—Sen. Cynthia Villar urges farmers here to consider joining the farm tourism bandwagon and transform their farmlands place as farm schools.
Villar, who was here on Nov. 4 to attend the birthday celebration of mayoralty candidate Marilyn Lambino, wife of Sec. Raul Lambino who is the presidential adviser for Northern Luzon, told Pangasinan leaders and other stakeholders that her Farm Tourism Law, passed in 2014, is part of her advocacy to help farmers, fishermen and their families.
In 2015, Villar said 380 farms already applied to become farm schools and the number has increased to 1,320.
This year, Villar said there are already 1,855 farms applying to become farm schools under the Technical Education Skills and Development Authority (TESDA program.
“Once accredited, you become an agricultural-vocational school under TESDA,” Villar said.
TESDA will pay students’ tuition enrolled in farm school with a maximun number of 25 students per class, she said.
“If you maintain 25 students for a month, every month you get paid P100,000 and you will be paid P1.2 million a year for only one hectare farm for this purpose,” she added.
The teachers and the modules to be used must be TESDA-accredited, she said.
Meanwhile, Villar said the Senate is set to pass this year the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund to give P10-billion a year to rice farmers to mechanize and to develop good seeds for local distribution instead of importing from Vietnam.
She said those smuggling rice to the Philippines get rice from Vietnam because palay per kilo in that country is P6 while the amount is P12 in the Philippines, all because farming there is already mechanized.
“So we have to teach our farmers how to produce these in-bred seeds that will grow your production from four metric tons (MT) to six MT per hectare,” Villar said
Meanwhile, congress she said, is trying to pass the Coconut Farmer and Industry Development law this year so that the coco levy fund can already be distributed to farmers. “They have at present P80-billion in cash and P30-billion in assets,” she said.
“We can give the industry P5-billion a year for the next 25 years coming from their coco levy fund,” she added. (PhilStar Wire Service)
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