The Philippines can produce enough food to feed its entire population, but the real crisis is that tomatoes rot in Cavite while sardine makers in Zamboanga import tomato paste from China, and fish pile up unsold in Tawi-Tawi while the same island lacks vegetables and chicken.
This is because no one has solved the problem of getting food from where it is grown to where it is needed, former Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel “Manny” Piñol said Wednesday, September 9.
Piñol made the statement in an interview on DZRH News program The Situation Report, challenging the assumption that the Philippines’ food problems are rooted in insufficient production.
The former Agriculture chief said the term he uses is food positioning, or the ability to match food surpluses in one area with food deficits in another, and this is where Philippine agriculture has consistently failed.
“Nabubulok yung kamatis sa Cavite pero yung mga sardines makers sa Zamboanga nag-i-import ng tomato paste from China. Yung Tawi-Tawi ang daming isda, tumpok-tumpok ang ibenta, pero kulang sila ng gulay at tsaka mga manok,” Piñol said.
He said the paradox has been visible for decades but remains unresolved because it requires a coordinated national logistics system, connecting farms to processors to markets across the archipelago — that no administration has seriously committed to building.
Piñol said the government should not be distracted by peripheral programs and new crop crazes when the basic infrastructure for getting existing food to existing markets still does not work.
The former Agriculture chief said solving food positioning would make a more immediate and dramatic difference to food security than any amount of new production targets, because the food is already being grown, it just cannot reliably get where it needs to go.
