The public market in Garapan has stopped selling farm produce since late last year and might not be able to open anytime soon.<\/p>\n
Aside from agreement contract issues with the government and organizational hurdles of the CNMI Farmers Cooperative Association, the bigger problem is that farmers don\u2019t have enough products to sell to the public.<\/p>\n
According to association president Crispin Deleon Guerrero, it was earlier proposed that the market open this month but this might not happen. <\/p>\n
\u201cWith the absence of most fruit and vegetables, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s going to happen,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said \u201cI don\u2019t want to open the market unless we got enough produce to shelf. Vegetables alone are not going to work.\u201d <\/p>\n
Deleon Guerrero said last year\u2019s typhoons such as Soudelor have really affected their plants and crops.<\/p>\n
He said there is not enough local produce on island and even some fruits are not flowering.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not going to open unless we have a good enough inventory to sell,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said. \u201cThe problem now is we should be having mangoes and avocadoes this month but [there is] nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Even local bananas are not for sale on island.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t have any fruits to substitute the shelves,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
He said they are looking at communicating with the other islands to send their produce for sale.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can guarantee some produce from Tinian and Rota, then we can open the market,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
However, the market also has other requirements that they need to comply with before they could open.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to have a manager, we have to have an employee, we have to pay for [Commonwealth Utilities Corp.] and things like that,\u201d Deleon Guerrero said. <\/p>\n
For now, Deleon Guerrero said is inviting farmers to sell what produce they have on hand outside the public market building every Saturday. He said they will be there from 6am to 11am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The public market in Garapan has stopped selling farm produce since late last year and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[8033],"class_list":["post-218581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-crispin-deleon-guerrero"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}