In the past few days, as I work home from work, I always pass by a group of vendors selling lemons along the sidewalk in Pacita Complex, San Pedro City. The price: just P100 per “tumpok”, which is about nine to ten pieces.
In fairness, the lemons were of good quality, and as a guy who loved lemons, the chance of buying them cheap – when P100 would buy you just three or four lemons at the supermarket – was too tempting to resist.
But what surprised me is that these lemon vendors have been selling their produce for over a month now, which meant that lemon producers probably had an “oversupply” of lemons and had to sell them cheap before they rot.
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There’s a Facebook page I was following called “Rural Rising Philippines,” which is basically a group of people buying out agricultural produce from farmers who can’t dispose of their crops due to the lack of secure markets for them.
Check their page, and you’ll see endless stories of farmers in danger of throwing away their produce – which meant time, money and effort just left to rot – because they can’t find buyers for them.
That has had me thinking: is there really a problem of food shortage in the country, as some sectors had insisted, or is it more of a problem of delivery and supply problems, as many members of Rural Rising Philippines have discovered?
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Even as the national government has touted of exerting efforts to improve the lives of many of our agricultural workers, the Department of Agriculture (DA) has been accused of being “import-centered.”
Agricultural groups have lambasted the sheer irony of the Philippines having had to import vast quantities of agricultural produce even when our country is blessed with natural resources that should have ensured a steady supply of produce.
Imagine, our country is surrounded by seawater and yet we had to import 93 percent of our salt supply!
But what’s more troubling is that some of our agriculture officials – the very ones who should have guaranteed steady markets for our produce – seem to put the blame of “oversupply” on the farmers themselves.
As a recent editorial by the Philippine Star noted, one undersecretary of the DA “chided the garlic and cabbage farmers for what he said was their lack of foresight and market assessment to prevent overproduction.”
Wow. If this is the mindset of many of our officials – that it’s the farmers’ fault that we have an oversupply of certain agricultural products – we may as well end up importing all our foodstuffs at a time when our currency is an all-time low.
And that will mean more hardships for us consumers who now have to endure the continued rise in the prices of basic commodities.