A coconut replanting technique using the more modern tissue culture that maximizes seedlings production will be pushed for adoption by the Coconut Industry Investment Fund-Oil Mills Group (CIIF-OMG) to help boost the country’s copra output.

Since the country’s major problem in raising production of value-added coconut-based products remains to be on the raw material lack, CIIF-OMG, Philippines’ biggest coconut oil producer, will support seedlings propagation through tissue culture.

“I like it to become successful because tissue culture will multiply many times our coconut seedlings production. We will still go into salt fertilization, but we will commercialize tissue culture once we’re able to pilot it successfully,” said Jesus M. Arranza, newly-appointed CIIF-OMG president and chief executive officer, in an interview.

The tissue culture program has been introduced by the Philippine Coconut Authority’s (PCA) Albay laboratory-experimental station.

The same PCA laboratory has developed the embryo culture which has enabled a 100 percent purity in the macapuno variety, a strain from a coconut mutation used as a raw material for special delicacies.

Once the Albay tissue culture program is completed, a similar laboratory that can produce tissue-cultured seedlings will be put up nationwide, said Arranza who is also PCA director.

“I don’t want a lab to be put up everywhere and spend money while the project is not yet completed. Once the Albay lab is okay, it can be replicated,” he said. CIIF-OMG has helped put up the P300-million fund for coconut salt fertilization and coconut-corn intercropping program of PCA.

The company and the PCA had planned since a few years ago a coconut planting and fertilization program that totaled to P1.5 billion as part of an aim to double the country’s coconut production from the two million metric ton level to four million MT. The original time table for the doubling of production was 2010. That was envisioned since this program was eyed around five years ago.

The Philippine Council for Agriculture, Forestry, Natural Resources Research and Development had extended a P250,000 grant to PCA for the tissue culture program.

Arranza said salt fertilization should continue since replanting takes time at least three years for hybrid coconut seedlings to bear fruit. He said in a related development that government is assisting Ivory Coast on the production of virgin coconut oil for which the Philippines is now known globally.