Breakup of Cartel,
Price Control for Veggies Urged
Farmers need built-in mechanisms for
pricing, a researcher from a Cordillera peasant alliance said in
reaction to the agriculture secretary's bid to provide Benguet farmers
additional outlets for Manila consumers.
BY LYN V. RAMO
Northern Dispatch
Posted by Bulatlat
BAGUIO CITY –
Farmers need built-in mechanisms for pricing, a researcher from a
Cordillera peasant alliance said in reaction to the agriculture
secretary's bid to provide Benguet farmers additional outlets for Manila
consumers. Benguet is an upland province of the Cordillera region,
northern Philippines.
Fernando Bagyan,
researcher of the Alyansa ti Pesante iti Taeng Kordilyera (Apit Tako or
Alliance of Peasants in the Cordillera Homeland) said that farmers face
problems in unfair trade due to the absence of government post-harvest
assistance mechanisms.
Bagyan said that
government should manage post-harvest facilities if it were to extend
genuine assistance to farmers.
Agriculture
Secretary Arthur Yap told Baguio and Benguet media last week that
highland farmers should learn to fight competition. He also announced
that he would be opening 134 new drop points for Benguet vegetables,
implying the elimination of middlemen. The bagsakan (outlets),
said Yap, will get vegetables directly from farmers and in turn
distribute produce directly to consumers, cutting layers of middlemen.
“That way, farmers will get more for their produce.”
Breaking the
cartel
Bagyan, however,
said that it would not be the farmers who would benefit from the trade
proposal, because traders will still be around between them and the
end-consumers because of the presence of what he described as a
“vegetable cartel.”
“All it takes is
the political will of government to break up the cartel,” Bagyan said,
referring to a shadowy organization of traders who allegedly control
trade not only in temperate vegetables but also other agricultural
produce like rice, corn, sugar, poultry and other livestock. “There
exists no traders' organization but everyone in the trade seems to have
the same language.”
The problem lies in
the government's inability to control prices, said Bagyan, as he
maintained that the the cartel dictates even farm gate prices.
Yap and Benguet
mayors Nestor Fongwan of La Trinidad and Concepcion Balao of Atok
visited the Balintawak, Quezon City market, one of the largest drop
points for Benguet and Mountain province vegetables Wednesday and found
that prices in the said bagsakan are high.
Cauliflower, for
example, sells at P40 ($0.83, based on a an exchange rate of P48.10 per
US dollar) while it is sold for as low as P12 ($0.25) in La Trinidad.
Broccoli, meanwhile, sells at P50 ($1.04) in Balitawak as opposed to
only P28 ($0.58) also in La Trinidad. Carrots cost P18 ($0.37), more
than twice the P7 ($0.15) price in Benguet.
Prices are even
lower at farm gate, according to some farmers who said that cabbages
cost only P2 ($0.04) per kilo before the frost hit some parts of Atok,
Mankayan and Kibungan in January and February. Because of the frost,
however, Benguet farmers opted not to harvest, leaving the vegetables to
rot in the gardens.
Need for cold
storage
Aside from
establishing new drop points in the metropolis, the agriculture
department also wants to concentrate on post-harvest facilities such as
cold storage for produce, which Apit Tako welcomes.
“Cold storage
facilities will help farmers because of the perishable nature of
temperate vegetables,” said Bagyan, who is equally apprehensive that if
the government does not manage such facilities, it would be corporate
interests that would benefit from such facilities. “Farmers and their
families should also be taught appropriate technology for storage and
transport of produce.”
Bagyan said that
there is “very little effort” on the part of government to put up cold
storage facilities. He said that the facility in La Trinidad is but a
show window of how government has been neglecting agriculture. “It
should be available when farmers need it, not just when businessmen
could profit from it.”
He said that if
mechanisms for the operation of the cold storage plant are not in place,
farmers or their families would only end up employees to multinational
agribusiness that would control the facility. “They will be hired as
packers and cutters instead.”
Earlier, the La
Trinidad mayor said that there have been negotiations with Dole Asia on
a cold storage facility. Dole Philippines, he said, is considering a
contract-farming scheme with Benguet vegetable producers, providing them
with “alternative livelihood” when it sets up a cold storage facility.
The Department of
Agriculture (DA)'s Ginintuang Masaganang Ani (GMA) program for
high-value commercial crops lists the establishment of cold chain and
cold storage facilities among its priority infrastructure projects.
Under the program, government encourages private sector investment in
post-harvest processing, bulk handling and cold chain facilities. The
program shall put up terminal markets and trading posts, including cold
chain, bulk handling and grading facilities established by the
government and the business sector. Northern Dispatch / Posted by
Bulatlat
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