DAVAO CITY—The Brunei
Darussalam minister on trade plans to attend the Mindanao Trade
Exposition (MTE) next week, mainly to seek partners in food products
from Southern Philippines, organizers here said.
Ann
Pamintuan, chief organizer of the MTE and president of the MTE
Foundation Inc., said this was the message of Agriculture Secretary
Arthur Yap, who was in Brunei for an Asian halal conference.
Yap
told Pamintuan in a mobile-phone call from Brunei that the Brunei
minister would join Yap in attending the opening ceremony of the August
13 to 16 MTE.
“Brunei
already had its halal-branding capability, but they don’t have the
products,” Pamintuan told a regular Wednesday press forum at the Marco
Polo Hotel here.
She
said the trade minister would talk on the halal line to Mindanao food
producers and initiate business matching on August 14 with interested
business participants.
The MTE bounced back from inactivity last year due to the initial bout of the global financial crisis.
In
an earlier launching of the MTE in June this year, she said the
exhibits this year would offer new packaging and product designs, as
well as more added-value packaging of raw materials.
Many of these products were the source products or raw materials of many exporters in Manila and Cebu.
Product
lines to be exhibited would include gifts, toys and housewares,
furniture and furnishing, home textiles, fashion accessories, fine
jewelry, fresh fruits, vegetables and processed food, flowers and
ornamentals and other allied services.
“We
are offering new designs and concepts every year for all our products,”
she told at a launching press conference at the Apo View Hotel in June.
She
said the Mindanao exhibitors were still mostly micro-, small- and
medium-scale producers and business groups, many of whom link the
exporters from Manila and Cebu to the source of raw materials in
Mindanao.
For
the last 12 years, the MTE has become the main trade exhibit for
Mindanao producers, and the activity has already gathered 1,590
exhibitors whose products and services were viewed by 151,000 visitors
since the first exhibit was mounted in 1996.
The
MTE exhibitors have also generated combined sales of P630.868 million,
with the years 1997 and 2003 topping the P100-million mark. In 1997,
sales reached P115.6 million, despite the ravages wrought by the Asian
financial meltdown, and in 2003, sales went up P135.8 million. In
between were fluctuating figures in sales.
