“We export humans, their labor in distant lands fueling the consumption needs of the people they have left behind”
August has come and gone.
Typhoon Carina lashed before the ghost month, which ends today, with no major weather disturbance except for the persistent “habagat” of our wet season, which oldtimers at the NFA always dreaded because the third quarter were lean months, when the summer harvest is supposed to supply the nation’s consumption needs as it awaits the harvest of September till November.
Our celebratory events coincide with the palay harvest:
May was the merry month when the harvests sustained our population during the pre-independence era.
Most of our fiestas gravitate around this period, when farmers thank the good Lord for the bounty of the good earth.
Then comes the holiday season celebrating the birth of the Christ. It also comes after the harvest two months before the Siberian cold winds descend upon our warm climate, bringing a welcome chill.
While the “simbang gabi” starts us off the novena of masses prior to Christmas Day, we have through the years begun the celebratory mood as early as September, when our ubiquitous malls start putting up the tinsel and the lights to entice consumers to buy for the customary gift-giving of the holiday season.
But, enough of the trivia.
My attention was called by recent news items about how our imports of beef and even pork have increased tremendously.
The USDA forecasts our 2025 beef imports to increase to some 226,000 metric tons next year. It attributes this to strong consumer purchasing power and population growth.
The former is a good economic indicator, if it were not for the inequality by which such growth is distributed.
The latter has been a perennial problem — we produce more and more mouths to feed while we hardly produce enough of the wherewithal to feed them here.
Far away Brazil rejoices at our meat imports from them, so does Australia, New Zealand and the US of A, and of course, for the very rich, the Japanese for their wagyu.
So, we import more and more, because “hungry stomachs know no law,” a quote I always heard from former president Erap.
Not only beef, but pork likewise.
USDA estimates next year, we will be importing 510,000 metric tons of a food commodity which we used to export once upon a long forgotten time to China.
That’s because of the African swine fever which our quarantine officials failed to suppress from entering the country as early as 2018.
I was then a resident of Taiwan, and unable to bring in goodies like frozen Vigan or Alaminos longanisa or even chicharron from Carcar or Baliwag which I missed terribly as I do not like Taiwanese sausages which were on the sweet side.
Now we have not been able to totally eradicate ASF-infested hogs such that even our provinces forbid the entry of meat from other provinces, some kind of hog racism.
Do many of us know that we import pork not from those of Asian provenance, but as far as from Netherlands and Spain?
Despite the cost of logistics, importers say they come out cheaper than if they were to buy locally produced pork.
But worse is the fact that we import our rice because our palay production is not commensurate to our rice consumption.
Under PNoy, DA and NFA estimated the annual shortfall to be 10 percent when the heavens were kind, 15 percent when it unleashed its fury through strong winds and rain.
Now that shortfall is 20 percent, and, if are to believe the USDA, it could be more.
The DA recently warned our traders to already import and take advantage of the tariff reduction our president decreed to lower the price of rice which is hounding him endlessly because he made a promise that was impossible to begin with.
But the Viets and the Thais are wise. You reduce your tariffs; time for us to increase our selling price.
We also import chicken because again, prices of deboned chicken are lower.
We import galunggong, which used to be the poor man’s fish, since replaced by tilapia which thrives in brackish water perhaps contaminated by human detritus.
We import carrots and mushrooms, almost all kinds of vegetables save for sitaw and upo, from China and Taiwan.
And we pay atrociously high prices for these vegetables, which are really of poor quality compared to what they eat in their countries.
We also import 95 percent of our garlic, and at one time, our onions became the most expensive aromatic and sauteeing ingredient in the whole wide world.
That is food. But we also import almost all of our oil requirements, and all the cars that use oil for fuel.
But we export humans, their labor in distant lands fueling the consumption needs of the people they have left behind.
