WHILE shocks are being felt, the country’s food supply remains stable.
This is the prognosis made by the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Los Baños-based Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (SEARCA) in a virtual conference yesterday.
The conference discussed how the coronavirus pandemic is affecting the availability of food on the table.
In Southeast Asia, the lockdown has reduced the farm labor, resulting in reduced overall agricultural production as well, said Dr. Glenn Gregorio, SEARCA director.
Filipino farmers are free to move, for example, but with some restrictions. While they can go to their farms, they may not be able to sell the produce because they may lack transportation.
Consumer demand for food and agricultural commodities in the region has also dipped because community quarantine has put livelihoods on hold. In countries where agriculture remains a major source of employment, reduced farm production could mean more people go poor and more could go hungry, Gregorio said.
Gregorio defined food security as sufficient and consistent food availability. It means access so that people are able to acquire food through purchase, home production, barter or trade. Food security means nutritious food, and food supply must be stable.
Citing the Global Food Security Index, Gregorio said the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and Myanmar are in the mid-range for food secure countries in Southeast Asia. Singapore and Malaysia are the most food secure while Cambodia and Laos are the least secure.
Improvements in Southeast Asia in 2019 reflected in the Global Food Security Index will be affected by the coronavirus pandemic, Gregorio said.
“The coronavirus highlights the importance of how we define food security,” Gregorio said. “Everybody is now interested on agriculture. Now is the best time to push agriculture forward.”
For its part, the DA is pushing its “Plant, Plant, Plant” initiative, Agriculture Secretary William Dar said, even as he assured there is enough food for the country.
He pointed to the 94-day inventory for rice, even with a surplus from domestic production and “a little of imports.”
He said the DA Rice Resiliency Project’s P25.5 billion budget this year will boost rice sufficiency to 94 percent. “If we do better in terms of proper planning and implementation, that can even be much higher,” he said.
The country has “so much surplus” in yellow corn, mainly used for livestock feed, he said. “We believe we have more than enough yellow corn this year for pork and chicken feed.”
The DA’s Corn for Food project is promoting white corn production with 20,000 hectares in Mindanao and Cebu planted to the crop. While corn will be blended with rice from the National Food Administration, Dar said.
There is some deficiency in the pork supply because of the ongoing African Swine Fever problem, he said. “Hog raisers have shifted to poultry,” Dar said.
“The 31-day inventory should not worry us because there is enough chicken to substitute for the pork deficiency, especially in the last quarter of the year,” he added. “At this time, we have enough pork.”
The vegetables inventory is good for three months, Dar said. “We can go beyond this 88-day inventory with the Plant, Plant, Plant and other programs.”
There is one area where the inventory leaves much to be desired. Only 60 percent of onions are grown locally and Dar said the country will need to import onions in the last quarter.
The same is true for garlic of which only 9 percent is produced here and the rest imported, he added.
“This is the food supply and demand outlook today,” Dar said.
