BY PAUL ICAMINA
source: Malaya Business Insight
Seaweed farming is one undertaking where a family-based enterprise is better than a corporate structure.
This is because seaweed farming is highly labor-intensive and needs daily maintenance. It is a family enterprise with the fisherman, his wife and children providing labor.
More than 150,000 coastal-and island-dwelling families cultivate seaweeds.
About 255,000 hectares are suitable for seaweed farming, of which 58,624 hectares are currently used, leaving 196,376 hectares more for expansion.
The average family farm is about a fourth of a hectare where seaweeds are grown offshore on about 500 plastic monolines each 10 meters long.
The estimated dried harvest of 10,000 kilograms a year at 60-day harvest cycles earns about P216,500 annually; investment is about P83,500.
Most farms are in Tawi-Tawi (24 percent), Sulu (22 percent), Zamboanga del Sur (18 percent) and Palawan (17 percent). In 2006, 1.469 million metric tons of seaweeds worth P6.35 billion contributed 70 percent to aquaculture and 33 percent to fisheries.
After harvest, the seaweeds are dried then sold to local traders and on to bigger buyers, exporters or seaweed processors like carrageenan manufacturers.
Dried eucheuma seaweed is the raw material for carrageenan. The Philippines produced 85,000 metric tons of this in 2004, down to 65,000 towns in 2008 and perhaps further dipping last year to about 60,000 tons.
Seaweeds are a major fisheries export, third after tuna, shrimps and prawns and ahead of crabs, octopus and cuttlefish.
The Philippines ranks second as the largest world producer of aquatic plants, including seaweeds, accounting for 7.4 percent of the total world production of 10.56 million tons.
The country is the largest manufacturer of semi-refined carrageenan and the third leading supplier of carrageenan in the world.
Seaweeds are the backbone of the $800-million world carrageenan industry. It is the fastest growing sector of the food additives industry worth anywhere from $5 billion to $10 billion.
In the 1960s, seaweeds were harvested from the wild. The first seaweed farm was started in Sulu in the 1970s by Dr. Maxwell Doty of the University of Hawaii. Sea farming was necessary by then because of overexploitation.
In 2008, the price of seaweed was more expensive than petroleum which hit $110 per barrel, according to Maximo A. Ricohermoso, president of MCPI Corp., one of the country’s major seaweeds players.
At that time, seaweed prices went up from $900 to $3,000 per ton. The price in 2009 was $1,200 per ton.
"We don’t want a boom and bust situation. When prices went down to P15-20 per kilo, we were concerned that farmers won’t cultivate seaweeds anymore," said Ricohermoso.
Because of the high prices abroad, farmers sold raw, fresh seaweeds to traders for the foreign market. Local processors ran out of raw materials and had to import from Indonesia.
Some 85 percent of total import volume of raw seaweed in 2006 came from Indonesia.
Philippine processors imported 40,000 tons from Indonesia in 2006 to fill part of the local demand of 160,000 tons, a supply shortfall that has been going on in the last three years.
Carrageenan is an important salad ingredient and additive in food, personal care, pharmaceuticals and other industrial applications. Personal care products include cosmetics, hand and body lotions, shampoo, soap, toothpaste and gel fresheners.
There are 1,062 species of seaweeds worldwide, half of them economically important and 280 edible.
Clinical testing is ongoing of a carrageenan-based hydrogel for burn and wound dressing. Another carrageenan-based gel reportedly prevents HIV/AIDS transmission during sex.
Local researchers are using seaweeds to improve texture and taste of stored bread; improve noodle resistance to overcooking; and as an ingredient in low calorie jelly and syrup and low cholesterol flan and even for skinless longaniza.
Dr. Emil Javier, who heads the National Academy of Science and Technology, wants the Department of Agriculture to promote seaweeds in 10 to 20 One-Town-One-Product centers and direct interventions to make them successful in two or three years and turned into demonstration towns.
To encourage farming, a province-by-province map is being developed to show seaweed areas, including non-traditional ones. The plan is for at least five towns per province, starting with techno demo farms, the establishment of seedling banks and so on.
"We need the government to pump-prime the industry with credit which is so hard to get and other programs such as the one-town-one-product scheme," said Alfredo O. Isidro, formerly a seaweed industry adviser for the Growth with Equity in Mindanao program.
"Government support is strong in Indonesia and Malaysia where they have single-digit interest rates," he said. "Here, credit doesn’t even reach seaweed farmers."
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