Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, April 25) — Cebu Governor Gwen Garcia challenged business leaders in the province to gear efforts towards ensuring self-sufficiency in food production after the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Yesterday, I met with all of the presidents of the chambers of commerce and I challenged them,” Garcia said in an online forum on Saturday. “We will reboot, we will refocus our energies into making Cebu self-sufficient in food production. So, from building condominiums to agribusiness.”
Garcia said the pandemic has taught the province a hard lesson when it still needed to outsource rice because they were not producing enough of the staple.
She said the same applies to corn, which Cebu has to import from Mindanao and other countries despite having ten to twelve operating corn feed mills.
“[I] challenged them, then: let us go back to the province, to our towns that have so much arable land. Ask them how much land do they have in the province and then go back to tilling this land,” Garcia added. “[A]fter all that has happened to us, we will have to go back to the basics, and food is the most basic.”
The governor said the pandemic has caused a shift in business focus from tourism to food production, which she said would be the new normal in the province in the years to come.
“There has to be a major shift between what we used to consider of primordial importance and that is, here in Cebu, building these condominiums, building more hotels, you know, focusing on the tourism industry because well, this is such a huge industry for us here,” said Garcia. “But seeing how things are developing internationally, we don’t see a rise of tourism or even a resurrection of tourism in at least the next couple of years.”
Cebu was placed under lockdown beginning March 26, which included the ban on the entry of all travelers on international flights in the province. A few days before, the province restricted all inbound air and sea travel.
As of April 25, the province has 294 confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to the Department of Health.
