P12M Philex fund benefits village folk

TUBA, Benguet – Thousands of villagers living in dozens of host and neighboring communities are now benefitting from four livelihood projects funded by the P12 million livelihood fund released by the Philex Mining Corp.

            

Gilbert Olayo, supervisor of Philex’s community relations department, said the company spent over P6 million to start up the aquaculture and livestock raising of the Damon clan; P5 million was used to provide the equipment and training of personnel for the meat processing center and P1 million was provided for the coffee growers within the mine camp.

            

According to him, the aquaculture project now produces at least 600 kilos of tilapia every four months and the same is supplied to host and neighboring communities while the livestock project that has over 200 pigs and piglets serves as the source of quality meat for the meat processing center and fresh meat needed by the over 2,000 families within the mine camp and another 1,000 families in host and neighboring communities.

            

“Philex wants to ensure that people living in its host and neighboring communities have sustainable source of livelihood even beyond mine life so that they will continue to earn sufficient income for their respective livelihood,” Olayosaid, adding community-based livelihood projects are now the main focus of the company’s social development management program (SDMP) in order to leave behind a descent legacy for the host and neighboring communities.

            

On the meat processing which is now being managed by the Community-based Training Center Meat producers Cooperative, Olayosaid around 4,500 kilos of meat is now being processed into home-made products such as the famous longanisa, sisig, tocino, tapa that could match the quality of commercially-produced ones.

            

Because of the growing demand for the processed meat products from the cooperative, Olayosaid they are now tapping the market in the Baguio and Benguet areas, thus, the cooperative is expected to process around 10,000 kilos of meat in a month in order to generate more income that could be plowed back for the improvement of the living condition of the beneficiaries.

           

For the company’s coffee project, Olayo disclosed around 1,000 Arabica and Robusta coffee plants are now bearing fruits in a 3-hectare land area within the mine camp while another 700 coffee plants are also grown in another area where their fruits are ready to be harvested once they ripen and ready to be sold to interested buyers of the coffee beans for processing into quality coffee.

           

 “We want to make the livelihood projects sustainable and self-liquidating so that those who will be left behind will continue to reap its fruits and help improve the living condition of the villagers around the mine site,” he said, adding that the projected mine life of Philex is until year 2020,

            

He said the mining company is fully supportive of the endeavor of host and neighboring communities to establish their own sources of livelihood to make living conditions in the countryside better compared to the previous conditions when the mine was not existent.