High food prices

I reached out to Agriculture Secretary William Dar last week to ask what was going on with food prices. My wife was complaining about the high cost of everything from meat to vegetables and fish.

I am trying to eat more vegetables but apparently, the prices of vegetables are also sky high. The typhoons were months ago and it shouldn’t be a logistical problem to bring veggies to Metro Manila.

Secretary Dar responded on Messenger within minutes. He said: “The highland vegetables are more than enough while the supplies on pinakbet vegetables are tight because of the typhoons in November. We hope that by the middle of February supplies will be much more. We are also mobilizing supplies from areas not affected by the typhoons.

“Chicken we have enough supply. For pork, the supply is too tight due to African swine fever or ASF. We are also mobilizing from green zones from Mindanao and Visayas. We are encouraging pork imports.”

I asked a friend who had a modest sized piggery in Lipa. He confirmed the sad state of the local piggery business.

“About 45 percent of hog farms big and small are gone due to ASF. If price control is slapped there will be additional closures.

“To transport 30 hogs for market you must have them tested at a price of about P21,000 from a private laboratory.

“LGUs, on the other hand, don’t have funds for disposal of infected hogs. If they spot a truck with suspected ASF hogs they simply turn them away instead of doing on the spot disposal. So kakalat.

“Dar, as good as he is, can’t solve this because it is literally the equivalent of COVID-19 for animals except that with ASF they all die.

“I lost 80 pigs in December and we have quit the hobby. I’m now concentrating on raising sabong roosters to sell!

“We buried the final batch of 31 pigs on Dec. 31, 2020! The source of infection is untraceable. I have a relatively high level of bio security and daily disinfection.

“Cost of quality feeds high, plus bio security, plus required testing tapos price control sure recipe that another 10 percent minimum will quit this year.”

How do we revive the pig industry? Is there something like crop insurance to cover disasters like this?

I am told commercial farms don’t get any compensation for their loss. The small farmers who get P5,000 per head will be waiting for many months before they get any money to start up. And because each claim is limited to 20 pigs at a time, claims must be filed under different names.

I asked him how much he lost. It hurts to recall. Just calculate on the basis of marketable pigs at 80 to 90 kilos selling for P190 per kilo as per DA even as the average farm gate price is now reported at P250 per kilo.

“A breeder sow would have a value of about P30,000 each. I lost 11 excluding the fatteners and piglets. Just close the chapter and now enjoy chasing after chickens for breeding!”

That’s one man’s story whose piggery was more of a hobby, an expensive and tearful one, it turns out. No more crispy pata for a long while.

As for poultry, the situation also doesn’t look good. Even big poultry raisers are closing down because buyers like Jollibee have cut down on purchases.

Until the latter part of 2020, the poultry industry claims it had already lost P95 billion due to subsidized chicken imports, while domestic poultry feed sales lost another P14 billion.

What bothers me, good as Sec. Dar is, we are not being told what to expect in terms of government actions beyond price control.

The Department of Agriculture (DA) asked President Duterte to impose a price ceiling of P270 to P300 a kilo of pork which now sells as much as P400 a kilo. Price control is like repealing the law of supply and demand. It won’t work. There is some profiteering by middlemen but the main problem is real lack of supply.

Sen. Ralph Recto is right: “First, focus on food. If the GDP report card is bad, the GNP – the number of Gutom na Pilipino – is worse. There should be a review of the farm-to-table chain. Every step, and not just focus on the narrative na ‘kasalanan ng middleman.’

“Many of the problems are upstream – production for one, and not just on overpricing. When traders are paraded as the usual suspects, we may not be able to find the real solution. The green shoots of economic recovery must be seen in our farms.

“Mahalaga ang pagkain, because Filipino families on the average spend 43 percent of their income on food. But the bottom 30 percent, or about 7.42 million families, allot almost 60 percent of their income on food. If the daily minimum wage won’t be enough to buy a pot of chicken tinola, then hunger becomes COVID’s deadliest side effect.”

Here in the city, workers who earn P500-P537 a day won’t be able to put enough food on the table for their families given the high cost of everything from veggies to meat to fish. More hungry stomachs will make the political pot boil dangerously.

In its Jan. 18 Bantay Presyo monitoring two days ago, the DA reported the prevailing prices of the following items per kilo: regular milled rice, P38; galunggong, P280; dressed chicken, P180; liempo, P450; talong, P200; repolyo, P230; and siling labuyo, P1,000.

Household consumption remains key to the growth rebound. With food prices at current high levels, families will cut consumption of everything else… there goes a consumption driven growth for other domestic businesses.

Involuntary hunger or hunger due to lack of food reached a new record-high of 30.7 percent, or an estimated 7.6 million households in a recent SWS survey. That is almost one in every three Filipinos.

I am amazed there isn’t more buzz about this food cost problem. It could blow up in our faces.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco