3,600 households to benefit from DA goat dispersal plan

MANILA, Philippines - Over 3,600 households are expected to benefit from a proposed goat dispersal project of the Department of Agriculture (DA).

In a report to Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap, Carlos Mendoza, executive director of the Livestock Development Council, said the goat dispersal program allocates a module consisting of one buck and 30 does per municipality covered by the project.

Each module will have 15 beneficiaries or an equivalent of 45 beneficiaries per province, Mendoza said.

This project is one of the DA’s contribution to President Arroyo’s Comprehensive Livelihood and Emergency Employment Program (CLEEP), a component of a P330-billion stimulus program to energize the domestic economy and help Filipinos ride out the deepening US-induced global recession, Mendoza said.

The biggest number of beneficiaries under the goat dispersal project will come from Central Luzon with 315 low-income households taking part in the project, Mendoza said.

The Cordillera Administrative Region, Bicol, Western Visayas, Eastern Visayas , and the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao will each have 270 beneficiary-families, he added.

A total of 225 families are being targeted in the regions of Cagayan Valley, Cavite-Laguna-Batangas-Rizal-Quezon (Calabarzon), Mindoro-Marinduque-Romblon-Palawan (MIMAROPA), Northern Mindanao and Caraga, Mendoza said.

The Ilocos Region, Central Visayas, Davao and Central Mindanao will have 180 families each benefiting from the project, while the Zamboanga region will have 135 household beneficiaries.

Yap had earlier ordered DA regional directors to immediately bid out its  labor-intensive, high-impact projects which are part of the government’s economic resiliency program.

“The plan is for the DA to speed up the implementation of these intervention projects in the first semester of the year to create a lot of jobs and stimulate economic activity in the countryside by the time the full brunt of the global financial crisis is expected to be felt in the Philippines,” Yap had said.

Expediting the bidding process would speed up the release of funds for projects, given that under government auditing rules, no disbursements can be made unless the bidding processes are completed and the winning bidders are named.