The advice given by Mr. Judan to participants in a seminar on Doing Business in China organized by the University of Asia and the Pacific reminded me of an article that recently appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal (September 14, 2006). Mei Fong wrote: "Investors are bullish about China’s dairy industry, in particular China Mengniu Dairy, which last week reported a better-than-expected 39% rise in first-half net profit to US.2 million. The company’s share price has more than doubled in the past year, closing at HK.62 (US.62) yesterday.

"The growing optimism is partly because dairy consumption is increasing among the historically lactose-intolerant Chinese. China’s dairy sector will expand by 20% to 25% this year, according to various industry estimates, and it already racks up about 60 billion yuan (US.5 billion) in annual sales, investment bank BNP Paribas says."

All my adult life I have always been told by my Filipino-Chinese friends that Chinese genes made them lactose-intolerant. I saw evidences of this. Everytime some Filipino Chinese friend would take milk, he would end up with a bum stomach. I, therefore, thought there was a scientific basis for this general opinion.

Now the Chinese are literally gulping up millions of liters of milk. Even biologically, their tastes have been "globalized." Our own local milk industry has been adversely affected because their milk imports from Australia and New Zealand have become more expensive. Raw milk prices have more than doubled in the last five years.

We should take the cue from the Land Downunder and target the Chinese market with a lot of high-value agricultural products. Already, we are the Number One exporter of bananas to China. We also sell large volumes of pineapple and coconut products to China. Even the non-food coconut coir has become a major export to China because it is used to cover thousands of square kilometers of desert land to prevent further erosion. Over the next ten to twenty years, our biggest export to China will be fruits, vegetables and fish products. As the more than one billion Chinese who are still too poor today to eat three square meals a day are enabled to participate more and more in the 10 percent annual GDP growth, China will be terribly short of food. It will have to import large volumes of food from Southeast Asia, especially high-value food items.

Filipino food manufacturers should learn from the success story of Filipino-Chinese entrepreneurs Carlos Chan, whose Oishi snack food products are a big success in China. Carlos sells four or more times in China than he does in the Philippines. The Chinese don’t even know the Oishi snack food was first developed in the Philippines. Some of them think it is Japanese. Given the necessary amount of risk-taking, products like banana chips, banana catsup, canned milk, canned tuna, chichacorn, Boy Bauang, etc. can also be hits in China.

Filipino entrepreneurs should also leverage on our highly educated and adaptable manpower to strike business partnership with the Chinese in such sectors as fashion, furniture, entertainment, education, executive search and business process outsourcing. We can field our very creative designers and craftsworkers to complement the low-wage garments manufacturers in China and come out with Filipino-originated brands like Pennshoppe and Bench. Filipino designers are more global in their tastes and can help the Chinese in developing fashion goods. The same thing can be said of our furniture designers and craftspeople. We can sell fashion goods and fine furniture to the Chinese market. As we already have done in Disney World in Hong Kong, we can send entertainers, including film talents to help China build their own version of Hollywood. We can put up educational institutions, especially for upgrading English proficiency, in China.

In the next ten to twenty years, China will suffer a serious shortage of middle-level managers who are fluent in English and steeped in global thinking. Our executive search outfits can help recruit Filipino managers for Chinese enterprises. My advice to university students and young professionals in management is for them to learn Mandarin so they can be very marketable to the Chinese business community.

China which has international reserves close to trillion can invest in the Philippines in mining, infrastructures, tourism facilities and retirement villages. The Chinese aging population is expanding rapidly while the young labor force is beginning to shrink because of the one child policy ruthlessly implemented in the last thirty years. We can attract investors in China to put up retirement villages for the senior citizens. Like the Koreans, the rich Chinese will find the Philippines ideal for honeymooners and golfers.

Finally, we can export some our successful solutions to poverty, like Gawad Kalinga of the Couples for Christ and Workers Cooperatives for contractual services like farm workers, security guards and retail workers. The cooperative system is the most palatable to a mind still highly influenced by the communist ideology. The Philippines should share its NGO solutions to the poverty problem with China. For comments, my email is bvillegas@uap.edu.ph.