"With prices soaring, hunger is not far behind."
The figures are out. The economy has contracted by 9.5 percent, the worst performance among our Asean neighbors. The pandemic has really hit us hard.
We can throw blame, but then again, there is nothing we can do about egregious mistakes or delayed reaction on the part of some of the President’s official family. I have said my piece several times since the pandemic began, and it serves no purpose to repeat them now.
We are all awaiting the vaccines, coming from different country origins with differing efficacies and storage conditions. We can only hope our officials, both national and local, have the logistical and operational capabilities to properly and swiftly roll-out the vaccines when they arrive. We also hope a proper communication effort would succeed in getting the public to volunteer for vaccination, given their anxieties about brands and country origins, and the trauma from Dengvaxia.
But this column is not about the vaccination effort. It is about food, and the worrisome situation we find ourselves in.
The President has just issued an executive order placing a price cap on food items, basic necessities that they are.
I myself was shocked when a week ago, I visited my favorite wet market and discovered to my chagrin that a kilo of pork liempo was P430, about the same price that the butcher charged for beef sirloin which we use for bistek and tapa. Wow!
And the price of vegetables too, whether lowland varieties for pakbet and sinigang, or those coming from our highlands. With the mercury dipping to 9-degree lows causing frost bites on delicate vegetables, expect further shortages and price increases.
I am told the price of poultry is also in the P200 bracket, where we were accustomed to buying whole dressed chickens at 120 per kilo last year.
Our usual bogeymen are the middlemen, whom we always portray as villainous price gougers taking advantage of supply and demand conditions. And so both DA and DTI pin their hopes on EO 124 as means to tame prices.
But hog and poultry raisers cry that the price caps are unrealistic because there is an actual shortage of food items, caused not only by recent typhoons and floods but by the dreaded African Swine Fever that our ports of entry failed to properly quarantine on time as early as 2019. That ASF has decimated some half a million of our hog population, and many producers have stopped re-populating their farms, suffering massive losses. Even the backyard raisers, among the country’s poor, have become miserable.
It was William Dar’s baptism of fire in 2019 when the ASF was detected in Rizal and Bulacan. The new agriculture secretary had not even warmed his seat after Manny Piñol was shunted off to MINDA when Taiwan informed us that ASF had invaded our archipelagic country.
Yet in the island of Taiwan, as early as 2018, all meat products without import clearances, such as those brought in by foreigners, mostly our OFWs, were banned at port of entry. And so we had to stop bringing in our frozen tapa and longganisa from home, just two hours away by plane, or get fined as high as a million Taiwan dollars.
Visiting Bureau of Animal Industry officials were amazed at how Taiwan interdicted such meat products while regretting that airport officials in our country had failed to impose strict quarantine and disinfection measures.
Truth is, with the current supply problems, and ASF having invaded Mindanao, with just about the Visayan island-provinces being spared of ASF contagion, price controls may be like King Canute ordering the waves to stop.
Food, as Sen. Ralph Recto continually warns, is half of the consumption expenditure of our teeming poor. And with prices soaring, hunger is not far behind. For the urban poor, that means suffering from a diet of rice plus instant noodles, carbo-loading to the max with minimum nutritional benefits.
Price controls will not work, and will certainly even impede future production. Malacanang imposed it because there is little else it can do, and only for 60 days, because beyond that, even the DA and the DTI know that caps cannot hold.
Importation is a solution, and as early as November last year, Taiwan was saying they expect to export frozen pork to the Philippines. Taiwan’s pork is of very high quality, but until our recent price movements, importing these were not a value for money proposition. Right now, we import pork from as far as Europe, where the price is much lower than our costs of production and distribution.
The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havoc on the world’s food production, and in many parts of the world, particularly in Asia, the weather has not been kind in the past year either, which would put pressure on prices of even such extremely basic food items as rice, corn, and other grains.
It is good that we still have a surplus of imported rice from the 2019 import binge by private traders, so much so that the price of rice has been relatively stable. But don’t celebrate just yet. Thailand and Vietnam are gradually increasing their prices, which is probably why traders are looking at importing from India and Pakistan, with cheaper grain prices but higher tariffs.
Our food security situation is something we have long neglected, and now we are paying the wages of such neglect. It is only now after a long drought of forward-thinking in the agriculture department’s leadership that plans are being drafted to stabilize our food supply.
Still, there are no instant solutions. And the time to re-set will produce varying results according to the gestation period of food products.
Meanwhile, the public will bear the brunt of such supply bottlenecks. Consumers will naturally cry for controls and importation to stave off immediate and short-term crises. But producers and farmers will be hit by such immediate measures, and the impact on their production capabilities and their financial profitability will be negative.
It’s a damned-if-you-do-and-damned-if-you-don’t situation. “Worrisome” is an understated way of describing the food situation.