Coconut farmers can take advantage of six times increase in profit from P10, 000 per hectare using traditional coconut varieties to P60, 000 with coconut hybrids, but cost of seedlings is apparently a problem for poor farmers shift to the high-yielding crop.

An Asian Development Bank (ADB) and International Food and Agriculture Development (IFAD) program has been trying to fill in farmers inability to shift to the coconut high yielding variety (HYV) even if this HYV has long been available in the Philippines.

The coconut hybrid yields as much as five to six metric tons (MT) of copra per hectare while the non- hybrid varieties produce only one MT per hectare, based on research station results.

But Philippine Coconut Administration (PCA) Deputy Administrator Carlos Carpio said that even if hybrid coconuts would just double current farmers yield, that would already be enough to raise the country's coconut production significantly.

PCA has made available these coconut hybrid 15 years ago, but farmers would not take on the technology due to financing. Cost of non-hybrid seednut is P5 each while the hybrid variety costs three times at P15 each.

With this problem, the country coconut hybridization rate is just at five to 10 percent, and this is despite the Philippines status as world's number one export of coconut oil, bring income of 0 million yearly.

Farmers' inability to adopt the technology has been blamed by farmers themselves to their having been deprived of the benefits of the coconut levy fund collected from them in the 1980s.

"Nobody wants to buy hybrid seednuts because of the price. Farmers are hoping they can get the fund from the coco levy," Carpio said.

At least, the ADB-IFAD program has required participating farmers to develop their own hybrid seednuts and produce five hybrid seednuts per year or 15 seednuts over the three year program. This way, farmers realize the tremendous impact of planting hybrid coconut on their income.

The ADB program provided a P1 million grant to each of its three pilots sites under the International Coconut Genetic Resources Database (ICGRD) program which included training farmers on hybrid coconut development and intercropping.

For intercropping, the program indicated that while a one hectare farm planted to coconut alone can give profit of P10,000, the same hectare intercropped with other plants can produce as much as P80,587 profit.

This highest profit was achieved in a Quezon site where one farmer made use of non hybrid coconut and interplanted it with sitao, amplaya, squash, papaya, and cacao. The second higher, P67, 007 per hectare, was in Cavite where non-hybrid coconut was planted with ampalaya, upo, patola, squash, banana, and cacao. In Regions 9 to 11, a farm with non-hybrid coconut mixed with black pepper recorded a profit of P61, 000 to P62, 000.

The fifth highest profit, P60, 000, was observed in a farm in Zamboanga with purely hybrid coconut, and this farm has not even been planted with any other crop. The hybrid coconut farm definitely faces even higher profit potential given intercropping.