The Department of Agriculture (DA) has underscored the need to cold storage facilities in Occidental Mindoro to address the province’s problems on oversupply and lack of post-harvest processes for onions.
At the same time, DA regional director for MIMAROPA Antonio Gerundio dismissed as “inaccurate” reports that the farmers resorted to burning their onions for failure to sell them at a profit. He said the onions were burned due to poor quality arising from poor post-harvest practices and worms that infested the crops.
Reports had it that that thousands of metric tons of onions were wasted in Occidental Mindoro due to poor farming practices, the recent heavy rains, and the lack of post-harvest facilities to meet increasing farming activities and market demand.
A warehousing facility in the province, WBI Cold Storage, could accommodate only up to 400 metric tons of farm produce, equivalent to 90 to 95 percent of total agricultural outputs.
Gerundio said 2021 was somehow profitable as onions were selling at P45 per kilo, thereby encouraging more farmers in Occidental Mindoro to switch to onions, unaware that cold storage would be a big problem later on.
He noted that because onion harvests in 2021 were fetching good prices, farmers planted almost twice as much, increasing the farm areas from 5,715 hectares to 7,569 hectares.
An oversupply of onions in the island dropped prices to about P12 to P15 per kilo, but production cost was P18/kilo. Output hit 90,828 kilos with more onions up for harvest this month.
Gerundio also ruled out importation as the likely culprit for the farmers’ woes since only 21,000 metric tons of imported yellow onions arrived during the first 3 months of 2022. The country’s onion requirement was estimated at 70,000 MT for three months.
While the government was able to source out a cold storage facility in Cabuyao, Laguna, it could barely accommodate five percent of Occidental Mindoro’s onion harvest.
In addition, two new cold storage facilities were recently handed-over to two farmer cooperatives in Occidental Mindoro, but they were not yet operational and could only house 100,00 bags of onions or 2.8 MT.
Gerundio said the facilities were expected to begin operating in mid-April as soon as the Occidental Mindoro Electric Cooperative, Inc. installs the transformers that would power the cold storage facilities.
For immediate relief, the DA regional office said it would re-align a portion from the Quick Response Fund (QRF) to release some P30 million as grant to cooperatives to buy onions from the farmers.
“We can only do this much since we do not have the mandate to buy from farmers. We are also calling on all onion farmers to store onions on their own, on ambient temperature to prolong storage by another two months while we are fast tracking the operation of the two new cold storage facilities,” Gerundio said.
The DA-MIMAROPA Agribusiness and Marketing Assistance Division said onion farmers would be wider access to markets South of Manila such as Walter Mart and the KADIWA centers in the region.