EDITORIAL - Going to waste

Facing a continuing lack of cold storage facilities, farmers in the country must also contend with competition from cheap imports.

This is the complaint of vegetable farmers in the Cordilleras, who lament that imported carrots have pulled down the prices of the locally grown produce.

It’s not the first time that this has happened in the agriculture sector. The nation has been seeing with depressing regularity farmers dumping their harvests such as tomatoes by the roadside due to dirt-cheap prices caused by a flood of imports.

The country imports agricultural commodities for various reasons. One is because there is a genuine lack in domestic production, such as in the case of salt and milk. Another is to stabilize supply and prices during lean periods – before the harvest, or after a natural disaster, pest infestation or livestock disease.

Still another reason is because there are crops that are more suited to certain climates and are better when imported, such as grapes, apples and various vegetables.

Domestic farmers, however, expect government protection from the entry of imported commodities that are widely available locally, especially during harvest season.

A balancing act can be facilitated by the conduct of an accurate inventory of agricultural production. Farmers’ groups, however, have lamented that for many years now, the government has been either unable or unwilling to keep such an inventory even of rice production.

In several countries with high agricultural production, drones and artificial intelligence have been employed for conducting such inventories, allowing for a science-based approach to determine how much must be imported during specific periods to ensure stable supply and prices of various commodities.

Lacking such inventories and efficient monitoring of domestic farm production, on top of the acute lack of cold storage facilities, local producers have been doomed to just give away or dump their harvests because the low prices make even transporting the crops to the market result in additional losses for them.

The carrot growers of Benguet are now considering similar moves as the market is flooded with cheap imports. Instead of yet another one-off ayuda or dole-out, which is the go-to response of this administration to every problem, the government must work on systemic, long-term reforms that will prevent local farm production from going to waste and aggravating poverty in the countryside.