BY VANNE TERRAZOLA
The Senate ratified has the final version of the bill that would make organic agriculture certification more affordable and accessible.
In its plenary session on Tuesday, senators adopted bicameral conference committee report containing the final bill which reconciled the disagreeing provisions on Senate Bill 1318 and House Bill 6878.
“This bill, once enacted into law, will provide for a more affordable system of organic certification, which will allow small farmers to benefit from producing organic products,” Senator Cynthia Villar, chairperson of the Committee on Agriculture, Food, and Agrarian Reform, and principal sponsor of the bill, said in informing her colleagues about the bicam report.
The measure seeks to amend the Organic Agriculture Act of 2010, or Republic Act 10068 and create the Participatory Guarantee System (PGS).
The PGS would serve as a quality assurance system where small farmers and fisher folk, farm associations or cooperatives and their products shall be certified as actual and active practitioners of organic agriculture and as producers of organic products.
It “is built on a foundation of trust, social network and knowledge exchange,” Villar said.
At present, the RA No. 10068, a third-party entity shall certify the organic farms of small farmers before they are allowed to label and sell their products to markets.
But the cost of third party certification costs up to more than P100,000 per crop, per year, “creates a very big barrier for small farmers to overcome”, Villar said. (Vanne Terrazola)
