BACOLOD CITY — The PHP14.2-million Negros Swine Integrated Enterprise will soon rise in La Castellana, Negros Occidental.
The implementation of the project, which includes the rehabilitation of a piggery building and construction of a feed mill located in Barangay Robles, kicked off with the groundbreaking rites on Friday that was led by Governor Alfredo Marañon Jr., Department of Agriculture (DA) 6 (Western Visayas) Executive Director Remelyn Recoter, Mayor Rhumyla Mangilimutan, and Deputy Project Director Cirilo Namoc of the Philippine Rural Development Project (PRDP).
The Negros Swine Integrated Enterprise is being implemented under the PRDP, a national project under the agriculture department jointly funded by the World Bank, the national government, and the participating LGUs.
The project, which will be managed by lead proponent La Castellana I Personnel Multi-Purpose Cooperative (LC I PMPC), chaired by Judith Obordo, is seen to benefit more than a thousand farmer-beneficiaries.
Marañon said the project will be a big help in improving the province’s swine industry.
Negros Occidental is the number one province in terms of swine inventory in the backyard level, and number three in both commercial and backyard swine production.
According to a DA-PRDP report, the LC I PMPC has been in the swine breeding, fattening, and marketing business for many years and its experience is not only limited to the production and management side.
It has also given the cooperative the opportunity to establish linkages with buyers within La Castellana and the neighboring towns, and the cooperative operates its own feed mill, it added.
Some 60 percent of the funding of PRDP enterprise-related projects comes from the World Bank while the DA and the recipient-LGU each shouldered 20 percent. (Nanette Guadalquiver/PNA)
