The administration of President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. will implement a calibrated importation of onions in a bid to safeguard farmers during the harvest season, Department of Agriculture Assistant Secretary Kristine Evangelista said in a briefing on Saturday.
“When it comes to what you were mentioning about the onion importation, the harvest our farmers are expecting, that has been taken into consideration by both the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) on the high-value crop… it’s a bureau, and our unit [is] in charge of that certain commodity,” Evangelista told reporters.
A calibrated importation “was something they had to look into,” she added, as the DA was waiting for reports on how many importers had applied to bring in onions.
This week, the DA approved the importation of 21,060 metric tons of onions to tame the rising price of the commodity.
“At the same time, I don’t know if you noticed, our importation has a cut-off unlike before,” Evangelista said, adding that the BPI put the parameters in place to safeguard the local onion harvest.
During the briefing, she noted that the farmgate price of onions has already gone
Gov’t…down to P250 per kilo. In December, onion prices spiked to as high as P720 per kilo.
“But this is something that we have to validate because it might just be in one area, but so far, from the reports I am receiving from the farmers themselves, and even some institutional buyers, there has been already a decline in farmgate prices,” Evangelista said.
Retail prices of onions, based on DA’s daily monitoring of 13 markets in Metro Manila, stood at P400 to P550 per kilo.
“That is high considering the cost structure of the onions, this is the production cost because we also talk to our farmers to find out how much it costs to produce onions,” she said.
Another DA official, spokesman Rex Estoperez, earlier admitted in a television interview that the department – currently led by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. as concurrent Agriculture Secretary – “committed errors in its resource mobilization” and the supply chain that caused the skyrocketing onion prices. Vince Lopez
“As we said, our shortcoming was more on the resource mobilization, how to bring this product to our markets,” he added.
Estoperez said the soaring prices of onions were due to the supply issue, as the DA has been consulting stakeholders on the volume of onion importation to bring down prices of the vital vegetable in the market.
The imported onions are expected to arrive on Jan. 27, ahead of the expected harvest season, said Rosendo So, president of the Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura (Sinag).
importation won’t guarantee reduced prices, Soi added, saying traders could hoard them in cold storage and delay the sale and distribution.
So said the local harvest of around 20,000 metric tons might take place until February and bring down prices to P120 a kilo.
He also said the farm gate price of onions might decrease to P80 to P100 a kilo and could be sold at P120 to P150 a kilo.
So attributed the soaring prices to the government’s non-importation of onions last year when it should have imported.