Know your onions

The other day, our cook went to market and bought onions, among other food items.

When she got back to the house, I saw five red creole onions and one huge white onion bulb.

Considering that I have not seen white onions in market or grocery for a long time, I asked why she had a single white bulb.

She replied by saying that there was a stock of red onions with a few white ones interspersed. Surprised, she asked how much the white would cost.

“You can get red onions, and add one white, at 350 pesos per kilo…but just one…imported ‘yan”—‚that was the vegetable retailer’s response. And knowing that we prefer white onions for our bistek Tagalog, she took the bait.

I knew it. Since there had been some noise and a few raids on “smuggled” onions, retailers could not sell white onions separately from their local reds (some are also imported), and since everyone has accepted the fact that red onions retail for 300 pesos plus your tears, the single white onion bulb, huge as it was, made 350 pesos a deal.

You cannot beat the retailers, nor the wholesalers.

They know their onions better than either law enforcers or the Department of Agriculture’s spokesman (incidentally, why have they replaced the pretty USec Kristine Evangelista with Rex Estoperez? Maybe Kristine found it too stressful to keep lying or making excuses).

Although onions, or garlic, or even chili peppers are not as important as rice or fish, pork or chicken, everyone is in a quandary as to why these aromatics are priced so exorbitantly these days.

Onions have become the symbol of food inflation in the country.

In a meme I saw recently, there was this buyer complaining about the cost of onions. “Para namang ginto ang presyo ng sibuyas,” she complained.

To which the seller jocularly riposted: “E ma’am, ‘di ba golden days ngayon?”

Let’s flash back to the hot summer of this year. In Bongabon, Nueva Ecija, the onion capital of Central Luzon, farmers complained of the very low farm-gate price offered by traders for their onions.

In Mindoro Occidental, farmers decided to burn or bury their bumper onion harvest, rather than sell to traders who were offering very much less than their cost of production.

Since October this year, we saw red onions in our markets go up in price from 250 to 300 pesos, even more as Christmas approaches.

Smugglers of onions mostly from China have to unload their hoard soon, because prices will yield to supply come local harvest time in the first quarter of next year.

Onions will not grow well in Mindanao, whose soil is more suitable to plantation crops, like bananas, rubber, and other fruit trees, and where the rainfall is more than what Luzon gets.

Northern and Central Luzon’s sandy loam is more hospitable to onion growing.

Oh yes, we do export some crops from the onion genus, mostly shallots, to Indonesia, where they are in high demand.

Most of these come from the Ilocos region, where in summer we see tiny shallots and the tinier but prized native garlic in braids hanging in roadside stores. Except for its use in pickling, few households in the country use shallots as much as onions.

We import garlic from Taiwan and China, and except for the Ilocos’ bulb, almost all the garlic we buy in NCR are imported. These are less pungent and redolent as the home-grown garlic, but are easier to peel.

In the time of the president’s father, when globalized free trade was unknown, my favorite solomillo a la pobre from Casa Marcos used those small Ilocos garlic, and didn’t bother to peel these.

But back to knowing our onions.

Properly stored after aeration in humidity and moisture controlled cold storage facilities, onions can last up to 10 months.

But because there are few cold chain facilities in the country, mostly privately-owned where moisture and proper storage conditions are not followed, our onion farmers have to sell their produce before they rot.

Many of the smuggled items are kept in the original refrigerated containers that promote bacteria-formation as they are not intended for long storage.

Climate change has also wrought ill effects on our crops.

Our rainy season used to come in June and last till September. It has now begun as early as late April.

This has disturbed both the harvest and the planting of major crops like palay. Now what has this to do with onions?

In the un-irrigated farms, palay is planted in the wet season, and after harvest, many plant alternate crops such as onions, because these require a lot less water than palay.

After harvesting onions in the first quarter, they then prepare their fields for palay once more, expecting the rains to come and provide for the water-guzzling staple.

If we had made good use of the Food Terminal which President Marcos Sr. established, and expanded it to critical farming regions instead of allowing it to go to rot with disrepair even to the point of cannibalizing and selling the steel and timber trusses of one of Southeast Asia’s largest cold storage facilities, we could have helped our onion and vegetable growers get higher incomes, with market prices stabilized.

There are, to be sure, many, many more horror stories of neglect and corruption that plague Philippine agriculture.

But there are solutions, so that in time, with the proper use of the record P178 billion that the DA is getting from the national budget, a quantum leap principally because the president himself is at the helm of agriculture for now, we should be producing crops like palay and corn, onions and vegetables more, and cure the imbalance between supply and demand.

And we need to take climate change seriously.

Neighbors such as Taiwan have been at the forefront of using technology to help farmers, its state and privately funded research companies advising farmers on what to plant, when to plant, when to fertilize, all to achieve optimal results.

We have a long way to go in solving our food security problems, but President Marcos Jr. is off to a good start with the quantum boost in funding.

Let us just hope that funding is used properly, not for farm-to-pocket roads, or fertilizer scams, or overpriced and inappropriate “mechanization.”

Otherwise, the regime of high food prices will go on year after year, and not only those “noche buena” items the DTI frets about mindlessly at this time when out in the countryside and the urban warrens of poverty, it is the cost of fish and rice, instant noodles, kangkong and talong that bedevils the poor housewife more than sweet spaghetti and hotdogs, even onions or chili, holiday season or no longer.