For PH Farmers To Thrive, They Should Be I-Oriented!

I saw the above tarpaulin in my hometown Asingan, Pangasinan that I shot at 7:45 AM Wednesday, 20 March 2019. The sign says, "Pangasinan Entrepreneurs Development Association Inc," PEDAI, and the group is based in Malanay, Santa Barbara, Pangasinan. In Santa Barbara, we have the Agricultural Training Institute, ATI's Regional Training Center I, meaning RTC for Region 1. This is relevant to note, as the Ilocos Region covers 4 provinces: Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, and Pangasinan, and the 9 cities within: Alaminos, Batac, Candon, Dagupan, Laoag, San Carlos, San Fernando, Urdaneta, and Vigan (en.wikipedia.org). 

Today, I'm looking at ATI as digital, or it should be. I mean, any farmer should not need to travel from Asingan to Santa Barbara, or go to town to ask the Municipal Agriculturist for information & insights. What's the cellphone for?!

Yes, that tarpaulin tells me about agribusiness. And my favorite columnist writes about that very subject today Thursday, 18 April 2019: "Tourism, Agribusiness And Digitization" (Manila Times, manilatimes.net).

I know that the Philippines owes Department of Tourism, DoT, Secretary Berna Romulo-Puyat for pushing for the brilliant idea of farm tourism. Mr Dar says:

(In 2018), the country’s tourist arrivals went up by 7.65 percent from the 6.62 million recorded in 2017. Sustaining the growth of tourist arrivals in the country can make tourism a major component for inclusive growth in the Philippines, especially if it forms part of the tourism-agribusiness-digitization paradigm.

And that is what I mean when the PH farmer should be I-Oriented (my coinage), as follows:

Income-oriented, IO.
Internet-oriented, IO².

The PH farmer is returns-oriented, not aware of his need to be IO; nor Internet-oriented, not aware of his need to be IO² too. Agribusiness and digitization are what he needs to get much more from farming.

Mr Dar says:

Agribusiness is definitely the only way for the farming (sector) in the Philippines to level up, and this means putting (an) end to the old paradigm that is anchored on traditional farming.

And how do we encourage that? Mr Dar says:

The old paradigm also emphasized supplying the local market with largely raw food products with very little or no support or incentives given to tap the export market.
Agripreneurship and agribusiness go hand-in-hand, and… the farmers themselves should also be encouraged to become agripreneurs.

Our farmers must go beyond supplying unprocessed food and be incentivized into growing produce processed into products for export.

Even so, we must make "agribusiness inclusive," as Mr Dar puts it. And how to do that? He says, "I recommend the Inclusive Market-Oriented Development (IMOD) that was part of the crosscutting strategies of the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics when I headed it from 2000 to 2014." I know IMOD, as I was international consulting writer for ICRISAT 2007-2014; in IMOD, farmers get their fair share from the value chain, being their own middlemen.

Working for IMOD, and being IO and IO² are the secrets of agribusiness ATI must learn, then digitize, to make available to PH farmers nationwide simultaneously!517