Small Filipino food producers in rural areas will be ushered into market integration in a program of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) that helps them take advantage of ”borderless trade” in Asean.

While certain Asean (Association of South East Asian Nations) countries such as Singapore and Thailand have been taking advantage of the more liberalized Asean free trade, Philippines’s poorer agricultural producers still need to be assisted into taking advantage of trade tariff eliminations.