THE Philippine Coffee Board Inc. (PCBI) wants the government to invest in the coffee sector to address a disparity between supply and demand and lessen the country's dependency on imports.

PCBI Director Alejandro Mojica said the country currently produces around 30,000 metric tons (MT) of coffee beans per year, which falls short of the local demand of 150,000 MT.

Mojica also said that production of coffee remained low even as processing and marketing had been addressed and was seeing significant increases.

"What's disheartening is that many want to process, but there's not enough production," Mojica told reporters on Monday.

He added that one of the major problems with coffee production was the lack of seedlings. The Philippines' current production per hectare is at 0.3 MT or 300 kilograms, he added.

In comparison to Vietnam, this volume is relatively small as that country's production reaches around 2.20 MT per hectare or 2,000 kilos.

"The first thing we observed in order to address production is the need to meet the demand for seedlings. And the solution we see is for each region to have its own nurseries and promote it to the farmers," Mojica said.

In order to address the gap between the booming demand for coffee and local production, the PCBI urged the government to allocate roughly P6 billion for the next decade or equivalent to P600 million per year.

"The government has to spend P600 million a year in 10 years to get to self-sufficiency, but those are very conservative figures, you can do maybe more than a 1,000 seedlings per hectare," PCBI President and co-chairman Pacita Juan said

Mojica also said that they were studying a partnership with the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) to locate nearly 300,000 hectares of land that can be planted with coffee.

The PCA said there were about 1 million hectares of land planted with coconut available for intercropping with coffee.

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