The Philippines’ chronic failure to solve its geographic fragmentation has produced one of the most absurd realities in Philippine agriculture: it costs more to ship bananas from Mindanao to Metro Manila than to export them to Japan and China, former Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel “Manny” Piñol said Wednesday.
Piñol made the statement in an interview on DZRH News program The Situation Report on September 9, identifying logistics and connectivity as the underlying structural failure that makes Philippine agriculture uncompetitive domestically even when it is competitive internationally.
He traced the problem to a long-running failure of economic planners to recognize that the Philippines’ island geography is the number one obstacle to agricultural development.
Piñol said this recognition motivated former President Ferdinand Marcos Sr. to build the Pan-Philippine Highway and former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to launch the Nautical Highway RoRo system.
“Yung old Ferdinand Marcos Sr. built the Pan-Philippine Highway, yung Maharlika Highway. That was actually a manifestation of his understanding na kailangan i-connect yung mga isla ng Mindanao,” Piñol said.
The former Agriculture chief said Arroyo’s Nautical Highway showed similar foresight, but neither initiative was followed through to completion.
“So right now, it is more expensive to ship bananas from Mindanao to Metro Manila than it is to ship bananas to Japan and China. At napakahirap,” Piñol said.
Piñol said the failure is not just a transportation problem but a food security crisis. When it is more economical to ship produce abroad than to feed your own people, the incentives for local food production are fundamentally broken.
He said the solution requires what no administration has yet committed to: a serious, sustained program to physically connect the Philippine archipelago’s islands in a way that makes domestic food movement cheaper and faster than international export.
