THE GOVERNMENT continues to protect the interests and welfare of the Filipino farmers and fisherfolk, and sourcing additional food commodities from other countries remains a “last resort” policy.
To meet the food requirements of the Filipino people, especially in this time of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Agriculture (DA) is investing heavily in the modernization and industrialization of Philippine agriculture, which are the cornerstones of the eight-point paradigm shift of Agriculture Secretary William Dar.
“Our vision of a food-secure and resilient Philippines with prosperous farmers and fisherfolk remains, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and onto the new normal. We will only allow imports to fill in the deficit or what we cannot produce locally,” Dar said.
He issued the statement to debunk criticisms and perceptions that the current DA leadership “made the country food import-dependent” despite abundant land and sea resources capable of producing most of the food requirements of 110 million Filipinos.
Based on a data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), the country’s dependency on imported food has been increasing during the past 30 years.
In 2016, import-dependency was at 22.5 percent, which slightly inched up to 22.7 percent in 2017, and jumped to 29.2 percent in 2018 – as local food production was not able to keep pace with population growth during that three-year period, the PSA said.
Based on PSA’s food balance sheets (FBS), the country’s self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) for aggregated food commodities fell to 79.4 percent in 2018 from 83.2 percent in 2016, and 86.8 percent in 2017.
The FBS provides a comprehensive picture of the country’s food supply during a specified reference period and provides an indication of the adequacy of food supply relative to the nutritional requirement of the population.
Increased food importation saw an annual per capita increase in the supply and consumption of cereals, meat, and sources of fat and protein.
PSA figures also show that the country has been importing several major food items, as a percentage of total national requirement, at varying rates, namely: rice, at 14 percent; corn, 12 percent; pork, 14 percent; dressed chicken, six percent; beef, 39 percent; onion, 38 percent; garlic, 91 percent; coffee, 71 percent; and peanut at 75 percent.
This was backed by Dr. Fermin Adriano, former information director of the University of the Philippines System and vice-chancellor of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, saying that low farm productivity should be blamed for the shortfall, as it has not kept pace with the population growth rate.
“While our population growth during the last decade, from 2008 to 2018, averaged around 1.7 percent to 1.8 percent, our agricultural sector grew an annual average of only 1.3 percent for the same period,” he said.
Clearly, there is a big gap, hence, the country has been importing additional food to feed the growing population.
“In economic parlance, this is a simple case of local demand outstripping local supply. Thus, importation is a necessary recourse to ensure that our people will not go hungry,” he said./PN
