Mindanao growers dare AFP's C130, private cargo handlers to bring down rates to bring veggies to Luzon

DAVAO CITY – The Mindanao Business Council (MinBC) here on October 12 has challenged the airline companies and shipping forwarders to offer special discounted rates to Mindanao growers, who assured typhoon-struck Luzon that they would offer cheap vegetable and other food items if transportation rates would be taken cared of.

“Or, if government is interested, it can send in the C130 of the Armed Forces to bring the cheap food products from Mindanao,” said Ednar Carlos Dayanghirang, executive director of the MinBC, who reacted to reports about the high-priced vegetables from Southern Mindanao reaching the Metro Manila markets after the floods have subsided.

He blamed the high freight cost for the high prices “when we have plenty and very cheap vegetables in the country”.

The MinBC and local government officials have long been challenging government to revisit the country's cabbotage law, or the law governing the local shipping industry, to allow Mindanao access the markets in Metro Manila.

“We can, and we want to help by sending our cheap food items here,” he told the regular Monday press conference of the Davao Press Club at the Cafe Rysus at SM City here.

Davao City Councilor Peter Lavina, said that high transportation rates have been a perennial problem among businesses in Mindanao, which often make it cheaper to import from neighboring Asian countries than to get the products from Mindanao.

The shipping industry has already warned in a statement last month against tampering with the cabbotage law or lose local shipping to foreigners.

Meanwhile, the Dayanghirang and the agricultural growers in Davao City has formed an agricultural board to petition the City Council to consider their 25-year development plan while the city reviewed its Comprehensive Development Framework.

Among the highlights of the 25-year plan was to discourage the conversion of lands “:while the city has not maximized the use yet of the areas identified and segregated for housing and industrial use”.

“We want businesses to maximize these areas first before they want to get the agricultural lands for housing and industrial use,” he said. “We don't want zoning changes to happen as fast a sit can be, because this will only encourage landbanking.”

Lavina assured however, that the City Council was not amenable at tinkering with the classification of the the prime agricultural areas “because these are the areas covered by law that should not be touched”. He said that these are the areas devoted to irrigated rice lands.


He said that the the Council has also suspended the approval of conversion of lands and has informed all landowners that it would not accept any petition for reclassification of lands for the duration of the review.

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