MANILA (UPDATE) — US-based firms are seeking to invest in the country’s agriculture and other sectors, as Washington rolls out its promised trade and investment mission to Manila.

Aviagen, a firm specializing in broiler breeding stock, said it wants to expand its distribution network in the Philippines.

Rafael Monleon, Aviagen’s business manager for the Asia-Pacific, said his firm had supply gaps here in the country, and that there were even times that supplies became “insufficient.”

“We have already established distributors... in the Philippines. We work with them closely, we have been working for many years. However, we identified a gap in the supply in the market,” Monleon told reporters.

“To fill that gap, we are looking at perhaps establishing our own operations to look at capacity and volume into the market for broiler breeding stock, which is actually our product. The Philippines industry has a very vibrant poultry industry, it has been growing very well for all these years and there is a demand for quality broiler breeding stock,” he added.

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Sought for a timeline on Aviagen’s expansion plans here in the country, Monleon said feasibility studies were still underway.

“We do not have a timeline, what we are really doing is exploring the possibilities of entering this market and this form and continuing [to support] our current distributors,” he said.

The Philippines, meanwhile, has a “strong return of investment in education,” said Thomas Merlot, a director at Northwest Missouri State University.

This was why Merlot plans on mounting an exchange program with Manila through scholarship programs.

“We received tremendous help from the university as far as financial and… being able to help students come to the US financially. This is kind of our contribution to the piece,” Merlot said.

“If we can provide students with some kind of financial help to bring added value to food security to the ultimate goal, I think this is what we can do for the Philippines,” he added.

Merlot deemed the country to have a strong potential in the sector.

“We will continue this work in a couple of weeks, we will come back to Manila and continue our efforts. It is definitely building relationships and what we talked about – we need to identify, we need to work in full and this is the success of this mission,” he said.

Joseph Walters, a senior program officer at the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU) said they would want to return to Manila to follow through with their action points.

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Walters said they also had a discussion with the Asian Development Bank, and he hoped to do a debriefing session with the regional development bank in “3 months’ time” to continue discussions.

“There may be other companies able to travel that we can include in that discussion,” said Walters.

“Maybe we build some more and have some perspectives coming into this. It has been very positive and we look forward to the follow-ups in these discussions,” he said.

The agricultural trade mission is the first of its kind in the Philippines. The delegation first came to Davao City to forge stronger ties with the private sector and Filipino farmers.

US Commercial Counselor Paul Taylor earlier told reporters there that the mission also aimed to address food security gaps in the country.

But he told reporters on Monday this does not mean that the US expects "the Philippines to be self-sufficient in food supply.”

“We are focused on partnering with the government of the Philippines to improve food security. The country does not need to be purely self-sufficient to have food security,” Taylor said.

The official cited Singapore’s situation, as it is a food-secure country that is “very reliant on imported agricultural products.”

“There will be a point in time where the situation in the Philippines will be more balanced in producing a more robust import market, something coming from the US, or something coming elsewhere,” he said.

The mission on agricultural technology was among those discussed by US President Joe Biden and President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr. during the latter's visit to Washington.

Biden had also vowed to send a Presidential Trade and Investment Mission to Manila that would feature "the highest caliber of US business leaders," with the White House describing it the "first of its kind."