“They had already sold all their onion harvests that time. They are now busy preparing for the planting of this crop and bent on targeting higher harvest of this commodity,” Serafin Santos, provincial agriculturist of Nueva Ecija, said in reaction to allegation that the province’s farmers are losing much because of the coming in of imported onions.
He said the allegation was aired in a protest-rally staged in a Nueva Ecija town recently and that the onion farmers were poised to appeal to President Duterte to protect the interest of the farmers against undue importations of onion.
On the other, Gregorio Quiñones, high value crops coordinator at the Nueva Ecija provincial agricultural office, said that the protest-rally held last November 11 in Bongabon, Nueva Ecija was attended by only less than a hundred persons, a few of them farmers.
One published report said more than 1,000 onion growers from the provinces of Nueva Ecija, Pangasinan and Tarlac joined the rally. They, among others, said they were protesting against an alleged syndicate of some agriculture offi cials and onion traders engaged in selling import permits (IPs).
They also said that a letter was sent earlier to Vivencio Mamaril, chief of the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI), requesting for a stop to the issuance of the IPs but he did not reply.
One co-op official even averred that the BPI collects payments for the issuance of the IPs at the rate of P20,000 per container van. She added that about 1,000 container vans arrive weekly at the ports of Davao City, Cagayan de Oro and Manila Port Area.
The protesters reportedly decried that the prices of imported onions in the market are lower than those locally produced and therefore placed their produce at a disadvantage. They said that imported onions are priced at P28-P30 per kilogram. The local onion produce, they said, could not be sold at that selling price because of the additional expenses for storage and hauling fees.
“The protesters could be traders and if some farmers were involved, they also are engaged in onion trading,” Santos and Quiñones said.
“They are the ones who were saying they have enough supply of locally produced onions which are kept in storage facilities,” Santos said. “But we are certain that we had a shortfall in the production of onion that’s why there was importation (of onion),” he added.
He said that as early as last September, they received an advice from the BPI to conduct an inventory of the onion stock in the province. The BPI feared that due to the onslaught of army worms on the standing onion crop, a big short fall of onion supply in the market will be experienced.
“Two teams checked all the stocks in various cold storage facilities in our province and reported that the predicted supply shortfall was confirmed,” Santos said.
He said the importation was a stop gap measure to ensure that there will be onions in the market. The welfare and interest of the onion farmers in the province will always be protected against undue importations of onion, he further said.
According to a DA documentation in 2013, Central Luzon was the biggest onion producer in the country region-wise, with an output of 73,911 metric tons (mt) or 55 percent of the 134,170 mt harvest in the country.
