I got to listen to the Department of Agriculture’s Undersecretary for High Value Crops and Rural Credit Evelyn G. Laviña discussed the revised Philippine Coffee Roadmap, which is due to be released late this year.
“We really need to increase our production and it’s not something that can be done overnight,” she said in Tagalog. “We in the Philippine Coffee Board will be encouraging people to plant coffee everywhere, from Sagada to Sulu.” She added that one of the biggest challenges of the coffee industry is geography, but it shouldn’t limit industry stakeholders. “We’re archipelagic, so logistics is hard, but there are many people interested.”Ms. Juan also answered an important question about coffee consumption: how many cups of coffee can a person healthily consume in a day?