THE administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has continued to promote the direct marketing platform designed by the Department of Agriculture (DA) that provides consumers access to quality and safe food items, while ensuring farm producers have ready market.
The Kadiwa ng Pangulo (KNP) is a spill-over of the DA’s marketing strategy dubbed Kadiwa ng Pasko, which addressed the high cost of agricultural commodities during the holiday season.
The KNP is just one of the programs of the Marcos administration that address the rising food prices due to global inflation. It also gives farmers, fisherfolks as well as micro-, small-, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) rent-free venues to sell their produce and increase their income.
DA’s Kadiwa is a market linkage facilitation program that has removed the unnecessary layers in the trading cycle. Less middlemen adds to the selling value of the products with consumers benefitting from freshly harvested crops and other food items at fair cost. It also capacitates the food growers to be agri-preneurs.
From February to March, five KNP outlets have been installed in Cebu City, Rizal Park in Manila, Sto. Tomas in Batangas, Pili in Camarines Sur and the Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP) compound in Quezon City.
The five KNP outlets had a total sales reaching P3.66 million in the two months of their operation. More areas will be opened soon following the President’s directive to install similar trading hubs in other sites nationwide.
The KNP is an inter-agency collaboration, implemented in partnership with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), Department of Social Work and Development (DSWD), Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) and the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG).
The DA-Agribusiness and Marketing Assistance Service (DA-AMAS) spearheads the conduct of the Kadiwa ng Pangulo and coordinates with Farmers’ Cooperatives and Associations for their possible participation. DA interventions include logistics support such as the transport of products from the farms to the markets.
Aside from KNP, AMAS leads the conduct of different Kadiwa modalities including the Kadiwa direct retail selling, Kadiwa on-wheels, e-Kadiwa and Farmers’Produce. It has also extended financial assistance to farmer and fisherfolk organizations under the Enhanced KADIWA Financial Grant Assistance Program to enable them to be reliable food commodity suppliers.
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