by APIT TAKO
The Cordillera continues to dominate the country’s production of temperate-clime vegetables, accounting for about 65% of national production. Around 300,000 people in the Cordillera region depend on the income derived from vegetable production and related services.
The major producers are the municipalities of Buguias, Atok, Bakun, Mankayan, and Kibungan in Benguet, Bauko in Mountain Province, and Tinoc in Ifugao. The oldest producers are La Trinidad, Kabayan, and Kapangan in Benguet. But La Trinidad has become increasingly urbanized and is now better known for its strawberries and flowers. Kabayan and Kapangan alternate between vegetable and rice production.
Philippine and Cordillera Production of Major Temperate-Clime Vegetable Crops, 2016-2018
| Crop | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | ||||||
| Phil Prod | CAR Prod | CAR Prodo as Percent of Phil Prod | Phil Prod | CAR Prod | CAR Prod as Percent of Phil Prod | Phil Prod | CAR Prod | CAR Prod as Percent of Phil Prod | |
| metric tons | metric tons | metric tons | metric tons | metric tons | metric tons | ||||
| carrots | 65,987 | 58,695 | 88.9 | 65,219 | 58,319 | 89.4 | 64,896 | 57,779 | 89.0 |
| wongbok | 50,745 | 43,984 | 86.7 | 50,266 | 43,376 | 86.3 | 49,662 | 42,566 | 85.7 |
| white potatoes | 116,783 | 99,981 | 85.6 | 117,637 | 100,423 | 85.4 | 117,423 | 99,201 | 84.5 |
| cabbage | 123,080 | 94,728 | 77.0 | 122,474 | 94,233 | 76.9 | 120,656 | 93,033 | 77.1 |
| broccoli | 2,859 | 1,821 | 63.7 | 3,159 | 2,077 | 65.7 | 2,906 | 1,791 | 61.6 |
| Baguio beans | 14,389 | 7,429 | 51.6 | 14,151 | 7,170 | 50.7 | 13,950 | 6,982 | 50.1 |
| Cauliflower | 11,641 | 4,868 | 41.8 | 12,061 | 5,432 | 45.0 | 11,328 | 4,867 | 43.0 |
| lettuce | 3,822 | 1,188 | 31.1 | 4,033 | 1,209 | 30.0 | 4,083 | 1,099 | 26.9 |
| Total/Averagae | 389,306 | 312,694 | AVE. 65.8 | 389,000 | 312,239 | AVE. 66.2 | 384,904 | 307,318 | AVE. 64.7 |
Source: Philippine Statistics Authority, https://psa.gov.ph, Selected Crop Statistics 2014-2018
Getting ready for the market
Major vegetable crops are cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, habitchuelas (Baguio beans), lettuce, potato, and wongbok (Chinese cabbage). Other crops include bakchoy, beet, capsicum pepper, cucumber, French bean, garden pea, kale, onion leek, pechay, red cabbage, and sayote. Tomato is also produced in Tinoc in large amounts of at least 3,000 metric tons a year, but these account for a mere 1.5% of total national production.
The majority of farmers along the Cordillera’s vegetable belt bring their produce to the La Trinidad Vegetable Trading Post (LTVTP) and the Benguet Agri-Pinoy Trading Center (BAPTC), both located in La Trinidad. Most farmers in the province of Ifugao bring their vegetables to the nearer Nueva Vizcaya Agricultural Terminal (NVAT) in Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya. A small number of farmers sell their vegetables through trading cooperatives and another small number to independent traders who go directly to their farms.
Most of the vegetable produce ends up in wholesale vegetable markets in Metro Manila and adjacent regions. According to BAPTC administrators, 60% of the produce they handle goes to the wholesale vegetable market in Divisoria, Manila; 12% to the wholesale market in Balintawak, Quezon City; 7% to the wholesale market in Urdaneta, Pangasinan; the rest to various markets in Luzon, including the Baguio City Public Market. According to Region 2 Field Office of the Department of Agriculture (DA), only 20% of the produce traded at NVAT remains in the region; 39% goes to Metro Manila, 29% to Region 3, and the rest to nearby regions.
The trade and production of vegetables has been beset with various problems for a long time now. Aside from those associated with the physical environment, it is beleaguered by volatile prices, steadily increasing prices for inputs, usurious credit-supply arrangements, and a growing concentration of land ownership in the hands of usurers. The government has made no intervention, whether in the form of interest regulation, price regulation, or subsidy.
Recent government measures for addressing the Covid 19 pandemic have exacerbated these problems. When government imposed Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) on the island of Luzon, it did so without first issuing clear cut guidelines on the trade and transport of agricultural commodities and instituting economic impact mitigation measures.
The lack of such guidelines disrupted market activities of vegetable farmers. First to feel the impact were Tinoc farmers who got cut off from their regular market outlets and input sources at NVAT because they could not get through police checkpoints set up at the boundaries of Lamut, Ifugao where Covid 19 first made its appearance in the Cordillera region. The farmers thus dumped their produce on the roadside for passersby to pick up.
Tinoc farmers looked for other ways and brought their produce to La Trinidad instead of Bambang. But on 25 March, the local government of La Trinidad closed the LTVTP. Farmers throughout the vegetable belt lost seven trading days as the LTVTP reopened only on April 1. The BAPTC had remained open but received far less produce than it usually got. Perhaps farmers and traders were confused by government announcements: first, the local government said it was locking down all of La Trinidad; then, after the national government interceded, it agreed to keep the BAPTC open.
In any case, upon the LTVTP’s reopening, Tinoc farmers flooded La Trinidad with some 1,000 tons of vegetables they had harvested hastily because their local government had announced its decision to prohibit traffic in and out of their municipality by noon of 1 April. A couple of days later though, residents of Tinoc convinced their local government to reverse its decision.
On 18 March, the Department of Agriculture started issuing “food passes” to facilitate passage of delivery food trucks through police-manned checkpoints. And by 22 March, DA had gotten the national government’s Inter-Agency Task Force on Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF) to agree to unimpeded passage of delivery trucks through checkpoints, whether or not these bore government-issued food pass stickers. But local government units along the highways leading to and from Metro Manila continued to insist on so-called border controls, and delivery trucks invariably got stuck in long queues as police checked truckers’ papers and their cargo, and perishable produce, like fruit and vegetables, often rotted or dried up. Vegetable dealers incurred heavy losses.
Vegetable prices rose and plummeted. Trader demand for those vegetables that lost the most moisture in transit, and thus the most weight – e.g., carrot, wongbok, tomato, and lettuce – fell below ten pesos per kilogram.
Spot Prices of Temperate-Clime Vegetables in Trading Centers, 19 March to 19 June 2020
| Vegetable | 19 Mar NVATa | 23 Mar LTVTPb | 16 Apr LTVTPc | 30 Apr LTVTPc | 11 May LTVTPc | 29 May LTVTPc | 19 Jun BAPTCc | 19Mar-19Jun Range |
| carrot – lowest | 4.00 | 1.00 | 2.00 | 8.00 | 8.00 | 10.00 | 13.00 | 1.00-35.00 |
| carrot – highest | 8.00 | 8.00 | 8.00 | 12.00 | 20.00 | 20.00 | 35.00 | |
| wongbok– lowest | 3.00 | 5.00 | 12.00 | 15.00 | 35.00 | 20.00 | 7.00 | 3.00-45.00 |
| wongbok– highest | 5.00 | 8.00 | 17.00 | 20.00 | 45.00 | 30.00 | 11.00 | |
| tomato – lowest | 12.00 | 8.00 | 4.00 | 4.00-40.00 | ||||
| tomato – highest | 18.00 | 40.00 | 8.00 | |||||
| cabbage – lowest | 4.00 | 15.00 | 22.00 | 25.00 | 32.00 | 24.00 | 4.00-50.00 | |
| cabbage – highest | 6.00 | 30.00 | 40.00 | 50.00 | 45.00 | 35.00 | ||
| lettuce – lowest | 5.00 | 20.00 | 25.00 | 30.00 | 25.00 | 5.00-70.00 | ||
| lettuce – highest | 15.00 | 30.00 | 50.00 | 60.00 | 70.00 | |||
| Baguio beans– lowest | 35.00 | 27.00 | 35.00 | 35.00 | 10.00 | 10.00-50.00 | ||
| Baguio beans – highest | 50.00 | 33.00 | 40.00 | 40.00 | 15.00 | |||
| cauliflower – lowest | 20.00 | 10.00 | 20.00 | 20.00 | 15.00 | 10.00-55.00 | ||
| cauliflower – highest | 30.00 | 15.00 | 25.00 | 30.00 | 55.00 | |||
| broccoli – lowest | 24.00 | 25.00 | 30.00 | 40.00 | 30.00 | 24.00-85.00 | ||
| broccoli – highest | 28.00 | 30.00 | 40.00 | 50.00 | 85.00 | |||
| potato – lowest | 50.00 | 49.00 | 34.00 | 60.00 | 60.00 | 18.00 | 25.00-68.00 | |
| potato – highest | 55.00 | 55.00 | 42.00 | 68.00 | 68.00 | 45.00 |
Sources: a – Department of Agriculture Regional Field Office No. 2, http://rfo02.da.gov.ph.
b – Manila Bulletin, https://mb.com.ph, 29 March 2020, “Farmers sell at a loss amid logistics concern”.
c – Charles Langpawen, posts at www.facebook.com/TRADINGP.
The vegetable trade declined. There were days when farmers arriving at the LTVTP or the BAPTC found only a handful of traders and decided to give their produce away to the public, some of them through government or nongovernment relief distribution groups, others by simply leaving them on roadsides under handwritten signs that read, e.g., “Take these carrots for free and remember us with love – Vegetable Farmers of Atok, Benguet.”
Eugene, a gardiner in La Trinidad, harvested only a few of his green ice lettuce which he gave away to his neighbors while the rest were left to rot. Eugene operates a 200 square meter farm where he planted lettuce at a production cost of P8,750. As in previous years, he timed his planting to be able to harvest from the last week of March to first week of April when tourists usually visit Baguio City and La Trinidad. The lettuce was of good quality, unaffected by any major pest attack or disease. He expected an income of about P15,000, but there were no buyers due to the quarantine.
Unsold vegetables free for picking
Another farmer, Engelbert, rented a 1,500 square meter farm in La Trinidad and planted it to strawberry and lettuce. Before the quarantine, around January to second week of March, he was able to harvest about P180,000 worth of strawberry. He expected to harvest until May but with the lockdown and with no buyers, he ended up donating his harvest for relief aid, while other produce especially the lettuce was also left to rot in the farm.
The decline in vegetable trading was also due to other restrictive quarantine decisions. Government early on banned hotel and restaurant operations and social gatherings. These accounted for a significant percentage of carrot, wongbok, lettuce, cauliflower, and broccoli consumption. Worse, government’s stringent guidelines resulted in a halt to public transport, suspension of construction activities, and closure of factories and other workplaces. And government was slow and inefficient in providing support for the survival of displaced workers and their families. Micro, small, and medium sized enterprises were also displaced. They were so hard hit by the months-long shutdown of their operations that many were forced to close shop permanently. By early June, 4.9 million Filipinos had lost their jobs, and unemployment had risen to 17.7%. (BusinessWorld, Andrew Masigan, “Why the IATF’s strategy did more harm than good,” https://www.bworldonline.com 14 June 2020). All of these meant that low to middle-income Filipino families now had much less money to spend on food than they normally did.
Cash assistance was finally disbursed by government to dislocated workers, farmers, and low-income families in a slow process that stretched from April to May. At the same time, some restaurant operators were able to bounce back into business by shifting to door-to-door food delivery. Vegetable prices recovered. But many farmers were on the brink of bankruptcy. Their unrecovered expenditures on unsold crops had amounted to P200,000 to P250,000 per hectare. Many of them had been able to avail of cash assistance from the Department of Social Welfare Development (DSWD) or the Department of Agriculture. But the amounts were small – P5,500 per family if it came from the DSWD, P5,000 per farmer if it came from DA, amounts simply not enough to invest in new crops. Thus farmers with too little or no savings resorted once again to borrowing on credit-supply arrangements with usurers.
“Agmula manen, ah, tapno makabawi! (We’ll just have to plant again so we can recover!) was the typical response of a vegetable farmer. “We have no recourse but to continue growing vegetables. It is our only livelihood.”