Quezon City, Philippines, — As part of its evaluation activities, the MTR team doing the review of MTCP2 visited an agricultural cooperative in the Philippines last May 21, 2016.
In response to a challenge from government for farmer groups to directly provide marketing services to their members instead of relying solely on government price and marketing support, the National Cooperative Marketing Federation (NCMF), a consortium of producer and consumer cooperatives engaging in rice trading, was organized in the early 1990s under the name Cooperative Trading Center or CTC.
Registered as a secondary-level cooperative, the federation purchases rice products from farmer groups mostly based in Northern Luzon and sells them on a wholesale basis to consumer cooperatives and other clients in Metro Manila and nearby provinces.
The cooperative has been profitable but it is facing challenge from private rice millers who are going directly to clients instead of through middlemen, and from imported rice.
The cooperative arm of the FFF, the Federation of Free Farmers Cooperatives, was one of the original members of the CTC/NCMF and the FFFC National Manager has been the Board Chairman of the NCMF for several years now.
FFF is one of the farmer organizations actively participating in the Medium Term Cooperation Program (MTCP) in the Philippines, which is now in its second year.
The cooperative has been leasing a portion of a government warehouse in San Francisco del Monte, Quezon City and currently has 3 national federations, 10 producer cooperatives and 5 consumer cooperatives as members.
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