By Allyana A. Almonte
The Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing (AFF) sector plays a significant role in the Philippine economy. In 2020, it involves about 25% of Filipino workers and contributes around 10.2% to the country’s gross domestic product — the highest record since 2017. This is amid the pandemic and livelihood-threatening circumstances such as low profit shares, increasing market costs, a glaring lack of youth interest in this sector, periodic droughts and floods, and limited access to a stable market.
Born out of the need to finally tackle these longstanding threats, Agrabah Ventures creates better opportunities for Filipino farmers and fisherfolk by providing a stable market channel that connects them directly with consumers and ensures that their produce are purchased at fair price.
Backed by technical and funding supports from the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) — Dado Banatao Incubator, Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development (DOST-PCIEERD), Villgro Philippines, Ashoka Foundation, ING Bank, and UNICEF, this integrated platform arranges the delivery of agricultural produce from farming communities to enterprise through a seamless digital experience of automated logistics booking.
Agrabah Ventures Co-Founders and life partners Joselito “Jun” Ocol, Jr. (chief executive officer) and Josephine Gumino-Ocol (chief operating officer), named the startup after the kingdom of Agrabah in the Disney film Aladdin, bringing the concept of creating ‘a whole new world’ for food producers to increase their income and for institutional customers to stabilize a supply chain for their business.
“The initial idea is a seafood-only e-commerce concept… We just wanted to help farmers sell their produce at a large scale, but now we want to help fix the agriculture value chain by making it more efficient,” Mr. Ocol said in an e-mail to BusinessWorld.
Since its launch in 2019, Agrabah Ventures continues to expand from being an online farm-to-market platform into a nurturing community where farmers and fisherfolk are provided with current market awareness, skills training, and income-generating connections, as well as access to agricultural technologies and financial loans.
The startup initially developed a platform that connects farmers and fishermen with institutional buyers for on-spot trading and large volume trading for crops and seaweed branded as Agrabah Wharf.
It also created Agrabah Logistics that enables carriers to connect to a network of growers wherein they can dry bulk commodity while providing a significant discount in the total logistics costs for farmers to ship across the Philippines.
In utilizing the users’ data of earnings and production capacity, Agrabah found out that farmers want to produce more but have limited resources to do so. Thus, they developed Agrabah Finance, an innovative loan aggregation platform dedicated to providing farmers, fisherfolk, service providers, merchants, and other participants in the agricultural value chain with fair and transparent money-borrowing options.
“Although they have good revenue streams, they lack documentary requirements such as ID, ITR and collateral to apply for a traditional bank loan to increase their production,” Mr. Ocol explained.
Farmers and fisherfolk who want to sell produce via Agrabah can register on their website (agrabah.ph). Once joined, Agrabah acts as the mediator for the registered individual or group by sourcing orders from big companies and employing farming communities who could meet the request for fresh products.
“When the pandemic hit the Philippines, we thought it would affect our business negatively, but it actually accelerated our growth. In collaboration with the Philippine Agri consortium members [who helped move the goods], we were able to help farmers secure orders even when physical markets were closed,” Mr. Ocol added.
The Agrabah CEO believes that the AgTech or agriculture technology startups play an important role in addressing the gap in the areas of trading, financing, and logistics surrounding the AFF sector.
“We hope that in the next 12 months through the help of our mentors and advisers, we can continuously work closely with the Department of Agriculture in making the value chain more efficient,” Mr. Ocol expressed.
More than 5,000 farmers and fisherfolk across the Philippines now join Agrabah in creating a better and sustainable marketplace where Filipino farmers and fisherfolk can fully harvest and enjoy the fruits of their labor.
