Filipino senator Imee Marcos has questioned the executive branch on the whereabouts of the surplus harvest of vegetables as the country is faced by rising prices. She said that the country has huge surpluses of harvested vegetables, amounting to over 700,000 tons in 2022. However, the Department of Agriculture Supply and Demand Outlook as of December 12 showed that the destinations and end-use of excess vegetables remained unclear.
This means that Marcos claimed there may be an unknown degree of food wastage: “This points to an unknown degree of food wastage and lost income for farmers and savings for consumers. The scenes of vegetables dumped by the roadside or left to rot unsold in trading centers are likely underreported.”
Marcos said that Department of Agriculture statistics showed that harvests of highland vegetables like cabbage, carrots, white potatoes, white beans, and Chinese cabbage from the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR), Cagayan Valley Region, and Northern Mindanao were able to push the country’s total national supply to 1.064 million tons.
“Clearly, there have been more than enough vegetables for everyone’s chop suey and pinakbet,” Marcos said. “The problem is not food sufficiency but food mobilization. Farmer-buyer linkages, transport access to deliver farm produce to local trading centers and the bigger cities, and storage facilities to prevent spoilage remain inadequate.”
Source: newsinfo.inquirer.net