Mindanao overproduction upsets Cebu hog farmers

CEBU, Philippines – Aside from the challenges brought about by the soaring prices of feed ingredients in the international market and the low rates they get from selling live stocks, Cebu’s hog farmers are also affected by the overproduction of Mindanao hog farmers.

In an interview with Plutarco Ong, the president of the Cebu Association of Meat and Poultry Producers, he said that demand for local hogs has deeply declined.

Aside from the low demand, the low buying rate of their products is also troubling the industry.

He said that the buying rate for their live produce now has always been at its lowest as they only get around P85 to P86 per kilo but despite this, traders in meat shops and wet markets continue to sell pork at a high price pegged at around P150 to P170 per kilo.

Ong said that this particular discrepancy of prices in the farm gate and in the wet markets seem to be overlooked by price monitoring reports of the Department of Trade and Industry so he hopes that the agency will look at it carefully.

“We have always been wondering why prices never went down in the retail level even if the farm gate price of our live stock has been at its lowest. This kind of practice has been affecting the consumers because of the high prices of pork, they either cut on their pork consumption or prefer other alternatives and decide not buy pork at all,” Ong lamented.

Other than that, another big challenge of the local hog producers is the overproduction of Mindanao hog farmers from General Santos, Davao and Cagayan de Oro.

He said that Mindanao hog farmers are bigger in number and they have bigger farms with high sow level but they do not have specified markets for their produce.

Ong explained that usually, these farmers sell their produce to the markets in Luzon specifically Metro Manila.

However, this trading is affected by different issues concerning the hog industry and the recent news on the spread of the H1N1 flu virus has created a big impact on their trading.

He said that as demand in Luzon continue to slump, Mindanao producers dump their stock here in Cebu creating competition between local hog farmers from Cebu.

“By the time consumption in Metro Manila drops due to impacts of certain issues that affects the industry; these producers lower their prices and dump their produce here in Cebu but the problem is that our consumption here in Cebu is enough for Visayan farmers to supply,” said Ong.

He said that the volume of stocks that are dumped to Cebu from Mindanao usually reach to around 60 to 80 containers of live pigs and these are slowly dispersed to the market and sold to meat vendors, malls and other traders either as carcass or live stock.

Ong explained that since in Mindanao feed ingredients like corn is sold at a lower rate, these farmers have the advantage and the capacity to lower their selling rates to entice the market.

He said that these Mindanao hog farmers do not adopt a depopulation mechanism which looks into the market demand trends because they do not maintain a specific target market for their produce so they usually overproduce even if there is a low season for pork consumption.

“They just produce without minding the market trend and the supply and demand proportions while for us, we know the trend and wave of the sales as we follow monthly and yearly patterns. For the months of May to August, the demand is traditionally down,” he said.

Ong said that given all these pressing challenges, their members which is now composed of 15 hog producers with around 2, 000 sow level continually checks and monitors the trend in production as well as in the supply and demand curve so that they would not over-populate in their sow level and will maintain enough supply despite the slowdown of market demand.