Official government data have been warning citizens and policymakers for more than a decade about the scarcity of agricultural products in the country. These reports about the availability of agricultural products in the market, which are accessible on the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) website, have long been warning us about our dependence on imported food items. The country has been importing agricultural products for years to plug the shortfall as clearly shown by official government data, but nothing was ever done to solve the problem.
The PSA publishes the Agricultural Indicators System series, which includes an annual report on Food Sufficiency and Security. The earliest report that can be viewed on its website was published in September 2010, when the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) was not yet incorporated into the PSA. The reference years for the report were 2005 to 2009 and it presented indicators on self-sufficiency ratio and import dependency ratio of selected agricultural commodities.
Self-sufficiency ratio or SSR measures the extent to which a country relies on its own production to meet the needs of the local populace while import dependency ratio or IDR indicates the extent of dependency on importation in relation to domestic consumption. BAS noted that a high IDR implies greater dependency on imports.
The 2010 report indicated that the Philippines was nearly self-sufficient in onion (white and red) as the SSR was at 97.4 percent in 2009. The country achieved onion self-sufficiency in 2011, when its SSR reached 107.7 percent, indicating that output exceeded the demand for onion that year. Onion SSR fell below 100 percent in 2012 but it stayed above 90 percent until 2014.
After 2014, the onion SSR had become erratic based on PSA reports. It was at 84.48 percent in 2015, 47.65 percent in 2016, 84.61 percent in 2017, 61.53 percent in 2018, and 90.5 percent in 2019. The PSA reports indicated that the country is capable of filling all the onion requirements of the domestic market. There are years, however, when the Philippines had to resort to massive importation because of the inability of local output to meet demand.
As for garlic, the PSA reports showed that the country had relied heavily on imports for years to plug the supply gap. The latest food sufficiency report revealed that the garlic SSR had fallen to a single digit (See, “PHL to suffer white onion, garlic shortage,” in the BusinessMirror, August 31, 2022). The highest garlic SSR was recorded in 2013, when it reached 71.92 percent.
While the PSA and BAS reports showed that local farms had long been unable to meet domestic demand for garlic, based on PSA reports, its SSR had always been at double digits. The garlic supply situation deteriorated starting in 2014, when its SSR fell to 23.3 percent. It took a turn for the worse in 2018, when garlic SSR fell to a single digit.
Aside from garlic and onion, the Philippines had to import rice, coffee, beef, carabeef, poultry, and even roundscad (galunggong) and tuna, based on the PSA report released in November 2021. The PSA reports are a good starting point for policymakers who are in the process of crafting a plan that would enable the Philippines to increase food production and end the country’s reliance on imports. The pandemic and the economic problems it caused showed us that we can no longer ignore official government data on food sufficiency.