DOST forms functional teams in Davao Region to assist SMEs, industries

DAVAO CITY – Selected teams on food safety and energy would be formed shortly by the regional office of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) to start widening the reach of the technology programs to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and to enable food producers to access accreditation from international bodies, the director of the DOST here said.

The teams would be highly mobile to serve the three Davao provinces, Compostela Valley and the cities of Tagum, Panabo and the Island Garden City of Samal of Davao del Norte, Davao City, and Digos City of Davao del Sur, DOST Director Anthony C. Sales told BusinessMirror.

The team on food safety would provide training and consultancy to SMEs, “our main target in almost all our programs and technology promotion”, he said. The region has actually already has one team roving around.

The other team to be immediately formed anytime next month would be on energy, “which would be tasked to conduct energy audit among national government agencies and the private groups”.

“It’s important to study the consumption level of each agency to identify areas of conservation,” he added.

The functional teams would be backed by another program on mobile laboratories that would also be going around the region to assist the many SMEs spread around. “These are vehicles equipped with testing and analyzing functions for food and water.”

“The problem of SMEs is accessing the laboratories and testing centers for their food products, and to access them is to travel to Davao City,” he said.

Like the food safety team, a single mobile laboratory was only recently acquired and has serviced Digos City, and poised to go around the rest of the region.

These two mobile programs intended to seek out the small businesses would also likely get a bigger boost from the expected completion this year of the technology innovation and packaging development center (TIPDC), which would house the labelling and packaging-design unit, the shelf life testing and the technology training facility.

The DOST would both develop in-house designers and hire professional designers to compose the labelling and packaging unit.

In shelf-life testing, Sales said that “this is a crucial requirement of the Food and Drugs Administration, formerly the Bureau of Food and Drugs”. “This facility would test and analyze for length of shelf life of a product, or how long would it stay in the display shelf.”

“We want to establish also a venue where technology training on food-processing would be easily transferred to the food producers,” Sales said.

“Food safety is a crucial issue in Mindanao because the bulk of our production is in agriculture,” he said.

“We would like to see the day that international accreditation bodies would grant the international standard certificates to our SMEs,” he said.

Sales said that many regions in Mindanao already signified request to access the TIPDC mainly for their shelf life testing and label design.

He said that the TIPDC, the “molabs”, or mobile laboratories and the functional teams would be funded under the General Appropriations Act “which did not slash our request of P4 million for the completion of the building”.

The other funding requirement would be taken from the national budget of the national office of the DOST for the acquisition of the design, packaging and shelf life testing equipment.

He said that the formulation of the programs came out in the consultation the DOST conducted with industries and the SMEs the previous months. He said they have consulted the sectors of corticulture, metals and engineering, gift toys and hairdressers, aqua-culture and fisheries.

“We hope that they would view these programs in a positive light. We expect them these industries to experience a break in their production by at least 25 percent,” he said. “We would also expect a multiplier effect and we would expect their suppliers and big industrial partners to experience a similar boost in production.”

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