Rep. Javier Miguel “Javi” L. Benitez (Neg. Occ., 3rd Districts) will convene the Metro Third Sugar Industry Stakeholders’ Meeting on the Red-Striped Soft-Scale Insect (RSSI) at Nature’s Village Resort in Talisay City on Sunday, August 2.
It will lay out the problems the pest is causing in the district’s cane fields and to settle on a data-driven and science-based response Metro Third will pursue together, a press release from the office of Benitez said Saturday.
Stakeholders will assess where RSSI has spread, what it is doing to cane growth, yield, sugar content, production costs and planters’ livelihoods, and whether existing figures on incidence and severity are validated at all, it said.
Field data submitted by stakeholders ahead of the meeting will anchor the discussion, so that the measures adopted rest on verified conditions on the ground rather than on estimates, it added.
“The insect does not stop at the fence line, and neither should our response. We did not call this meeting to announce what we already know. We called it to find out what we do not, and to agree on what we will do about it,” Benitez said.
Technical talks by invited experts, mounted in coordination with the Philippine Sugar Research Institute Foundation, Inc. (PHILSURIN) and other research institutions, will cover the identification, biology, monitoring, prevention and management of the pest, the principles of area-wide integrated pest management, and the provincial government’s ongoing programs on RSSI.
Each measure will be weighed on the evidence for its effectiveness, its costs and its limitations in the field.
Among those invited are the provincial government, the five Metro Third LGUs, city and municipal Agriculture and Environment and Natural Resources Offices, national agencies, state universities and research institutions, sugar millers, planters’ federations and farmers’ associations, and all barangays with sugarcane areas in the Third District.
The meeting is expected to close with a common implementation framework and action plan that define the roles of government agencies, sugar mills, research institutions, local government units and farmers, along with a resolution adopted on the day, all grounded in the data and technical findings presented, the press release said.*
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