Productivity, land/water access and logistics
Philippines: Decline in agricultural production down to three factors
This was stressed by industry leaders during a press conference for the 11th Philippine Food Expo to be held on February 23 to 26. They pointed out that these problems need immediate attention with resolve to arrest the continued low performance and declining competitiveness of the country’s agro-food processing and food exports.
The continued paucity of supply of essential raw materials which are vital inputs for the food manufacturing/processing industries is one of the main factors cited as directly hampering the export performance of the sector.
For example, mango, which is the country’s third most important crop next to bananas and pineapple continue to decline in production. In 2009, output stood at only 771,000 tons from a high of over one million tons in 2007. Production fluctuated from 2000 to 2009, posting an average decline of 0.7 percent per year.
The downturn was attributed to several causes such as changing climatic conditions, incidence of pests and diseases, and immature trees. However, from the perspective of over 2 million small mango growers, the main reasons for the yield decline from 2000 onwards of 4.5 percent per annum ending at only 4.1 tons/hectare in 2009 was caused by the high costs of inputs, the lack of investments in research and development for better quality disease resistant and higher yielding varieties as well as the scarcity of long-term finance which prevented new plantings.
It was noted that the Philippines' yield of mango was among the lowest in the ASEAN. At only 4.55 tons per hectare in 2010, this was only about 40 percent of the yield of Cambodia and 35 percent that of Indonesia.
It is incongruous to think that the Philippines performance in agro-food exports lags behind its ASEAN peers and far from global averages. The country’s productivity of many agricultural crops registered yields below global average.
Professor Ronaldo Doy, who has written books on the industry said, “The market is not necessarily the compelling constraint in most of the products. It is supply constraints, which are first, farm productivity, second, land and water access and third, the logistics from farm to market. They affect the throughput within the agribusiness system singularly or in combination.”
Source: www.zampen.com
