BM Mylyn Pineda Cayabyab tries her hand at harvesting ampalaya.
CITY OF SAN FERNANDO – Fresh from the farm, as fresh at the community pantries.
Buying direct from the local producers and delivering direct to the open pantries in various towns in Pampanga, former Lubao mayor and current 2nd District board member Mylyn Pineda-Cayabyab has been bridging the gap between two market forces. Not in the traditional profit-motivated middleman way but out of pure altruism. Helping both ends – income for the local farmers, the daily sustenance of the community’s neediest – cope with the travails wrought by Covid.
Wednesday, Cayabyab, along with her peers in the sangguniang panlalawigan, visited farmers and poultry raisers in San Luis town, as much to purchase their produce as to engage them in a dialog on the impact of the pandemic to their livelihood.
In Barangay San Juan where a significant portion of the town’s poultry raisers – at least 14 duck farms – are located, their lamentation was the significant reduction in the demand for duck eggs, a major ingredient in pastries and confectionaries, as well as a favorite Filipino street food – balut.
“Demand had not been the same due to the quarantine restrictions,” Cayabyab noted, stressing that the restrictions on public dining as well as in the movement of people have resulted in a less vibrant demand not just for poultry products but for most of the agricultural produce.
Vegetable hauler Virgilio Nantes, 56, told her that the sale of ampalaya has dropped this cropping season compared to pre-pandemic harvests. He said that P25 pesos per kilo now could easily spell ruin if there is a lot of supply of the product in the market and not much takers.
Cayabyab’s buying the harvest of ampalaya for the day moved Nantes to near tears.
The sudden closure of big community markets for disinfection and quarantine restrictions could also mean that products under consignment would remain unsold for days resulting in spoilage.
Cayabyab said that to ease the effects of the pandemic on local agriculture producers, she had been calling on various sectors to prioritize the buying of locally produced products for community pantries and relief distributions.
To Nantes’ lamentation that the agriculture sector in the countryside has been virtually left on its own to grapple with the adverse economic effects of the pandemic, the board member promised to bring the concerns of farmers to the legislative level to assist them with better linkages in selling their products amid a less aggressive consumer sector.
Cayabyab bought several kilos of locally produced vegetables and eggs and distributed these to several community pantries in the province also on Wednesday. – With MPC-IG
