Nourishment that poisons us

Every year, the Philippine agricultural sector braces for devastation. Between super typhoons, erratic monsoon rains, frequent floodings and scorching droughts, our farms and fisheries routinely suffer billions of pesos in losses. When we talk about food security, our focus naturally lands on these visible climate disasters that drive up prices and leave millions of Filipino families struggling to put meals on the table.

However, alongside these extreme weather events, our food systems are being silently compromised by a different, equally pervasive byproduct of industrialization: microplastics.

Microplastics, or tiny fragments created when larger plastic items break down, have spread across our environment. Because plastic never truly disappears, these tiny particles build up in our soil, farmlands, rivers and oceans. They accumulate across terrestrial and marine food webs. The threat they pose to our nutritional security is becoming more alarming each day as more studies detect their presence in different food sources.

In agricultural lands, microplastics settle into the soil, altering its structure and making it harder for crops to absorb water and nutrients. In our marine ecosystems, the story is just as grim. Local studies examining green mussels (tahong) and milkfish (bangus) have found microplastics inside their digestive tracts. Marine animals eat these tiny bits of plastic, and those particles – along with the toxic chemicals they carry – make their way directly onto our dining tables.

This environmental hazard reaches all the way into our homes. A recent Greenpeace International study, titled “Tiny Plastics, Big Problem,” looked into popular baby food pouches produced by multinational corporations. The results were alarming. Researchers found microplastics in the products tested. A single pouch from one leading multinational brand was estimated to contain over 5,000 microplastic particles, while a pouch from another popular brand contained more than 11,000.

These colorful pouches are marketed to parents as a safe and healthy way to feed their children. Yet, tests show that the packaging itself sheds microscopic particles directly into the food. Whether plastics are stunting crop growth in our soils, accumulating in our coastal fisheries or leaching directly into infant food, all of these impacts are equally dangerous. They attack our food supply from every angle.

We can no longer treat plastic pollution merely as a solid waste management issue. It is a direct threat to food safety and public health. The fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) corporations that manufacture this packaging operate on a business model that internalizes profits while externalizing the ecological and physiological costs onto the public. By flooding the market with single-use plastic, they are forcing consumers to participate in a toxic food system where safe alternatives are systematically priced out or made unavailable.

We must expand our idea of what food security really means. It is not enough to simply produce enough food to survive the next typhoon; that food must also be safe to eat.

The solutions must start at the source. We cannot simply recycle our way out of this crisis, nor should the burden fall on parents trying to navigate supermarket aisles where plastic-free options are deliberately priced out of reach. True accountability means shifting the responsibility back to where it belongs – the FMCG corporations that profit from this pollution.

The government must step up with firm national policies that drastically reduce plastic production, rather than settling for laws that only focus on waste recovery and cleanup. We need legislation that explicitly mandates these companies to phase out single-use plastic. More importantly, it is time to mandate a just transition toward safe and accessible reuse-based systems. This is actually not a radical or a new idea. It is simply a systemic upgrade of our traditional – once sustainable – tingi culture. By investing in localized refill stations and standardized reusable packaging, we can ensure that Filipinos can buy what they need without taking home a pollutant.

Until we stop letting corporations package our food in pollution, the nourishment we rely on will continue to poison us.

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Eunille Santos is a campaigner at Greenpeace Philippines.