A meeting last week of the Corn Competitiveness Board with Trade and Industry Sectretary Cesar Purisima signals the near and full implementation of the corn roadmap, which is envisioned to energize and revitalize the country's livestock sector, the direct user of this vital feedgrain.

The meeting mapped out ways by which the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) can help the corn industry's growth through incentives that can be extended to participants in the various aspects of the roadmap, explained chairman Doris Magsaysay-Ho of the National Corn Competitiveness Board, who met with Purisima and Agriculture Undersecretary Theresa Cruz-Capellan last week.

Ho made a presentation of the roadmap, more commonly referred to as the National Grains Highway Program, recently crafted by the Corn Board under the guidance and supervision of Capellan. The program spells out the seed to shelf interventions needed in production and the logistics system.

The grains highway program promotes the use of production clusters, a cost efficient way of bringing together facilities and processes in one location so that a cluster will have the needed production and post harvest facilities, a feedmill nearby, a community of hog and poultry raisers, a grade A slaughterhouse and cold storage facilities and processing facilities to prepare meat cuts for both domestic and foreign markets.

The roadmap endorses three types of corn clusters, namely 500 hectares; 1,000 hectares and 2,000 hectares.

Capellan said the program calls for the conversion of farms planted to open pollinated varieties (OPV) to Chinese hybrid corn, which effectively increases the yield to 10 tons per hectare (versus OPV's 2.8 tons per hectare).

Also, using the genetically engineered Bt corn that is resistant to corn borer (a plague that cause annual losses of 30 percent of farmers' harvest) - extends the planting windows of corn and regularizes the supply of corn all year round.

To further increase the income of corn farmers, the program also calls for organizing farmers into service centers equipped with mechanical dryers, shellers, silos and trucking for bulk handling that can only be made viable if farmers are organized into production clusters of at least 500 hectares per cluster. "The bigger the cluster, the more economically viable is the operation of the service center," Capellan explained.