Taming Food Inflation! (1st of a Series) Food Repositioning Strategy: Bringing Food Where Needed

(Two weeks ago, I was asked by a member of a private sector group providing inputs to President Ferdinand R. Marcos, jr. on matters involving Agriculture and Food Security, to share my thoughts on how to make basic food commodities available and affordable for Filipino consumers. In two days after the meeting, I was able to piece together my ideas on how to address food inflation through the National Food Repositioning Strategy and I am sharing these inputs with the followers of this page in a series of posts starting today.)
Linking Farms & Kitchens
In a country of over 7,000 islands, the problem of food availability and affordability is not caused by the lack of supply but poor “repositioning” of agricultural goods.
“Tamban” or Sardines Fish sold for P200 in the big cities, sells for less than P50 in many coastal towns of Zamboanga del Norte.
In Nueva Vizcaya, Tomatoes sell for P10 per kilo and the excess are thrown away to rot by farmers but the Sardines factories of Zamboanga City import Tomato paste from China.
The classic example of this anomaly is the Onion produced by farmers in Mindoro bought by traders for as low as P12 during peak harvest and sold last December for a ridiculous and immoral price of P700.
The low prices of farm products because of market access problems result in dampened planting intentions of farmers thus affecting productivity.
AVAILABLE, AFFORDABLE FOOD
The National Food Security Strategy has three major programs:
1.The National Food Consumption Quantification Study;
2.The National Food Supply and Demand Map;
3.The Agriculture Market Reform Program
All these programs would make food available and affordable while increasing productivity of the agriculture sector, thus addressing food inflation and rural poverty simultaneously.
FOOD CONSUMPTION STUDY
In 2016, as Secretary of Agriculture, I proposed the conduct of the “National Food Consumption Quantification Study” as a joint program of the Dept. of Agriculture and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO), which later received a UN-FAO funding of $300,000.
The NFCQS started by the UN-FAO in 2017 and completed in 2019 aimed at providing data for the following concerns:
1. What kind of food do Filipinos prefer to eat;
2. What is the consumption level of these types of food?
3. Where and how could these types of food be produced in huge volumes?
4. How long could the Philippines’ land and water resources sustain the supply of these types of food?
The NFCQS which was intended to be the Mother Document of all Food Security Programs in the country was completed in 2019 but the results were not utilized.
FOOD SUPPLY & DEMAND MAP
In 2018, the DA conducted a National Food Security Summit which invited farmers groups and local governments to a 2-day workshop to present the products which could be sourced from their areas and the DA support needed to boost the production.
There were four clusters: Northern Luzon, Southern Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao and the participants included fishermen from as far as Sitangkay, Tawitawi.
The goal was to craft a National Food Supply and Demand Map which would be digitalized to obtain a real-time availability of basic food commodities needed daily by Filipino families.
The NFSD Map would indicate:
1.Provinces or Regions which produce basic commodities in excess of local requirements;
2.Cities, Provinces or Regions which would need the excess commodities.
A perfect model for this would be Tawi-tawi which is in dire need of Chicken, Vegetables, Fruits and Rice (smuggled from Sabah) but is the source of huge volumes of fish for areas like Metro Manila.
Fish is abundant in Tawitawi, Sulu and Basilan but the problem is how to bring the daily catch to the big cities in the Visayas and Luzon at the least possible cost to make this affordable to the Filipino consumers.
(The first two photos show fish in Bongao Market, Tawitawi while the third photo shows huge fish caught by fishermen of the seas of Mapanas, Northern Samar.)