Benguet set to host country’s sericulture revival

BAGUIO CITY — A 1970s mulberry enterprise in Benguet province is getting a new lease on life, thanks to a government initiative to rebuild the country’s sericulture industry and ensure a local supply of silk.

Science Secretary Renato Solidum said the old Benguet operation had been designated the north Luzon sericulture hub under the government’s Seda Pilipinas program. “Seda” is Filipino and Spanish for silk.

Solidum announced the initiative through a message he delivered remotely at the opening of the 7th Philippine Silk Summit held at Camp John Hay on Wednesday.

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Sericulture is silk farming that involves cultivating mulberry trees to feed silkworms or the larvae of silk moths. The cocoons spun by the silkworms are processed into yarns used by traditional weavers as well as by garments manufacturers.

“When we talk about Philippine silk history, it naturally leads us to Lanao del Sur (where Maranao and indigenous communities produce handwoven ‘malong’ skirts and other commodities). But in the early 1970s, the National Science Development Board (predecessor of the Department of Science and Technology) took over the sericulture project from the Mountain Province Development Authority, handing its stewardship to the Philippine Textile Research Institute (PTRI) in 1973,” Solidum said.

Rebranding

Silkworms brought to Baguio City and Benguet farmlands in the 1900s were remnants of colonial government or academic projects across decades which were harnessed and cultivated in the 1970s and 1980s at Benguet capital La Trinidad town as well as farming towns like Kapangan, said Dr. Julius Leaño, director of the Philippine Council for Industry, Energy, and Emerging Technology Research and Development.

“The market was not also ready, and the supply chain was disjointed” at the time, he said, so sericulture never took off in the mountains where the cool weather had been good for raising mulberry trees.

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“Silkworms are not endemic. But if a certain silkworm breed stays in a location for more than 10 years, the moths become acclimatized so we can already call its product Philippine silk,” pointed out Leaño, who recently served as PTRI director and is a convenor of Seda Pilipinas Consortium.

“Before the year ends, the PTRI takes a major step forward: rebranding (Benguet) as the central Philippines silk center in northern Luzon. Beyond supplying hybrid silkworm eggs and production technologies, it is expanding to establish the Silk Innovation Center, a processing center capable of supplying at least 17 percent of our national silk requirements,” Solidum announced.

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“Reaching this capacity relies on strong public sector collaboration, supported by 44 hectares of mulberry plantations and 44 weaving houses … With the clear gap between current domestic output and our textile industry needs, our goal is deliberate. We must systematically expand our capacity to produce the silk our country requires. Self-sufficiency includes a steady supply of natural textile materials, fulfilling the requirements of the Philippine tropical fabric, the piña cloth,” he said.

READ: Local brand Bayo is reviving the dying tradition of silk making in the north

Seda Pilipinas is putting together “an integrated value chain network” spanning the Cordillera, Western Visayas, Northern Mindanao and Caraga regions and Panay Island, Solidum said.

“By the end of 2026, the regions will collectively contribute to reaching that 10-percent annual requirement, marking our first step toward 100-percent Philippine self-reliance,” he added.

Transition

By the first quarter of 2027, the La Trinidad sericulture center would have been put up and the recipient of cocoons to be transported from Mindanao in order to establish a repository, Leaño said. The cocoons were bred in Benguet but were exported to Mindanao in the 2000s, and are being returned to the Cordillera which Leaño described as an anchor for sericulture innovation.

Leaño acknowledged that the Cordillera, where indigenous loom weaving is still practiced, would not be the immediate market for silk because local weavers prefer cotton.

But he said the PTRI had been “transitioning a lot of our weaves, particularly in Mindanao” where the “inaul” handwoven fabric common to Maguindanao and Maranao artisans have adjusted to using cotton “and we are now re-rendering inaul with Philippine silk.”

Lawmakers from the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) will begin developing laws to develop the silk supply chain, said Baileng Mangtawil, minister of Science and Technology, on the heels of their first parliamentary elections in September.

“The silk industry in BARMM is not new. It has been part of our daily lives since time immemorial, because the items we use are produced by skills passed down by our ancestors. We use malong … we call the fabric inaul. We use that in our everyday life and even when we are in the farms we use malong. That is why the new Bangsamoro government intends to enrich sericulture,” Mangtawil said.

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The government can also build new trade bridges with Asian neighbors who buy or produce silk now that the Philippines chairs the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, said Aklan Rep. Jesus Marquez. Aklan’s piña handloom weaving was inscribed as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, he said.