OPINION
Eight pesos a kilo
The price is only the receipt. The problem is that we have spent seven years paying it and calling that a policy.
Last year, this country imported 851,760 metric tons of pork. In May, the President signed Executive Order (EO) 116 and raised the minimum access volume (MAV) for pork to 204,210 tons — roughly a quarter of what we were already bringing in.
The arithmetic should have ended the debate. The MAV was never the dam holding back imported meat. Pork has been arriving over the quota wall for years at the 25-percent out-quota rate that Executive Order 62 locked in until 2028. EO 116 did not open a floodgate. It widened a door nobody had locked, then handed 120,000 tons of the opening to Food Terminal Inc. (FTI) and 30,000 to processors.
Ask the farmer how that feels. The Philippine Statistics Authority put farmgate liveweight at P172.44 a kilo in the second quarter. Producers put the cost of raising that kilo at around P180. The raiser loses roughly eight pesos on every kilo he walks to market. That pig reaches a Metro Manila stall as liempo at P379.43. Two hundred pesos separate the pen from the palengke, and not one of them lands with the man who did the feeding.
The herd tells the rest. We had 12.7-million head before the African swine fever. We have 8.93 million now. The commercial segment shrank by 24 percent in a single year while backyard farms climbed to 79.3 percent of national inventory. That is not recovery. That is an industry regressing into its least defended for — because the backyard raiser is exactly the one who cannot afford perimeter fencing, controlled entry, or a veterinarian on call. We are rebuilding the herd in the precise shape the virus prefers.
And seven years into ASF, what is the program? The vaccine sits under monitored release — 800,000 doses, six Luzon provinces, still not a commercial product — while Negros, Iloilo, Capiz, and Cebu flared again this year. Repopulation was announced at 32,000 gilts and P1.6 billion against a deficit of nearly four million head.
Indemnification still arrives late and short, and that last failure is the whole disaster in miniature. A farmer who will not be paid for a culled pig does not report a sick one. He sells it fast and quiet, and the virus buys a ticket to the next town.
Make the import a bridge then, and not a destination. Sunset EO 116 on a published date, with monthly utilization posted publicly, and a trigger that suspends allocation whenever farmgate sits below the cost of production.
Require FTI to buy local first at a fair floor before it touches its 120,000 tons. Move the vaccine from pilot to funded national rollout with a hard deadline, starting where the disease is and not only where Luzon is convenient. Pay indemnity at replacement value within thirty days. And spend on cold chain and slaughterhouses, because a P200 spread between farmgate and retail is not a farmer’s margin — it is a value chain nobody has been willing to fix.
We keep calling the price of pork the problem. The price is only the receipt. The problem is that we have spent seven years paying it and calling that a policy.