The Department of Agriculture warned over the weekend about rising food prices amid reports of further chokepoints in the global supply chain that may lead to upward pressures on production costs.
“The agriculture sector this year will confront global challenges, such as other countries stockpiling fertilizers and fuel prices going up. Our country will have to contend with rising consumer prices, as the rest of the world, even developed countries, is doing,” said Agriculture Secretary William Dar.
Dar said the DA recognized the urgency brought about by the pandemic and vowed to speed up the enforcement of more local balanced measures to ensure affordability for food consumers.
The DA noted that global food prices reached record highs during the pandemic, with the United Nations Index revealing a 28-percent rise, from grains to meat, in the last two years. Record levels of food inflation were last seen in 2011.
Labor shortages in transport and high freight costs also grounded goods, especially during the recent surges in COVID-19 infections in most countries.
The rise of vaccine mandates among the largest global economic players also compounded mobility issues among workers. Talks of obligatory vaccinationsignited political turmoil in some countries.
Philippine agriculture suffered not only from the pandemic, but also from calamities such as Typhoon Odette that ravaged the Visayas and Mindanao.
The department said the African Swine Fever remained a threat to the local livestock sector as there is no known cure. The sub-sector registered a 16-percent contraction last year.
Such factors led the agriculture output to a contraction in 2021 and off its original target of 2-percent growth, Dar said.
Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority showed that the agriculture, fishery and forestry sector registered a 0.3 percent decline in 2021, following a 0.2-percent drop in 2020.
Dar recently issued a directive to DA regional field offices to keep up food mobilization from food surplus provinces to major metropolitan markets.
“We are enhancing production in areas and provinces around Metro Manila, such as Central Luzon, and creating a quadrant of food baskets around NCR. Our regional field units have been tasked to empower farmers’ cooperatives and associations to export directly their surplus fruits and vegetables to metro areas,” Dar said.
The DA said it consistently maintained importation as a policy of last resort in the event local production levels in basic food commodities came up substantially short of demand.
“We have to make affordable basic food items to the large Filipino consuming public, who get more than 50 percent of their protein source from pork, and 30 percent from fish,” he said amid the protests by farmer and fisher groups and legislators against importation.
Meat inflation soared to 17 percent in 2021, according to the National Economic and Development Authority report on inflation while fish inflation also contributed to 2021 headline inflation by as much as 8 percent.
