Pests, pigs, and panic

Two crises are eating through Western Visayas and Negros Island right now, one pest at a time and one pig at a time, and the response from government looks the same in both cases: reactive, underfunded, and just a little behind.

Start with the Red-Striped Soft Scale Insect. As of June 21, validated infestations had hit 13,797 hectares of sugarcane across the Negros Island Region, involving 5,258 farmers. SRA Administrator Pablo Luis Azcona has warned that if left uncontrolled, the damage could reach PHP 17.5 billion in lost sales, roughly equivalent to losing nearly one fifth of the country’s sugar output in a single crop year. Negros Occidental alone produces 64 percent of the country’s sugar. That is not a regional problem. That is a national supply chain problem dressed in provincial clothing.

What makes this worse is that RSSI is not new. The pest first emerged in the Philippines in 2022 and was contained in the Pampanga region until early 2025. Somewhere between then and now, it reached Negros, and the island, which holds the majority of the country’s sugar, was caught flat-footed. One affected planter said the spread is “very fast” and that he was caught off guard.

The SRA has the technology: entomopathogenic fungi, specifically Metarhizium anisopliae and Beauveria bassiana, both known for their ability to eliminate pests without harming the environment. The problem is scale. Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. has said there must be enough biocontrol agents to cover at least 75,000 hectares, while the SRA’s own laboratory cannot meet even a fraction of current demand. That gap between what the science recommends and what the institution can actually produce is the real emergency.

Then there is the PHP 200-million aerial spraying proposal from the United Sugar Producers Federation. Governor Eugenio Jose Lacson was right to pump the brakes. Studies show chemical treatments offer only temporary relief, and Lacson noted that mass spraying in other countries has not resolved similar infestations. The political optics of spraying are attractive: visible, swift, decisive. But the pest itself will return once conditions allow, especially if climate patterns continue producing the prolonged dry seasons that RSSI thrives in.

The PHP 200 million is better spent building out distributed biocontrol laboratories: one at the SRA, one at PHILSURIN, one at the provincial agriculturist’s office, and at sugar mills themselves, as former Governor Rafael Coscolluela has suggested. Coscolluela has it right: “RSSI is here to stay, so we need to have a permanent structure and mechanism in place to control the pest.”

Meanwhile, on the hog front, Capiz has confirmed ASF in Roxas City, Panitan, and Pontevedra. As of June 5, only Antique and Guimaras had no municipalities under ASF red zone classification in Western Visayas. Guimaras moved quickly; Governor Ma. Lucille Nava signed a ban on June 26, and rightly so. Western Visayas had previously been among the last remaining regions in the country that stayed ASF-free since the first outbreak in July 2019. That status, rebuilt painstakingly over years, is worth defending. It is not just a veterinary distinction but a market credential, the difference between a hog raiser who can sell freely and one who cannot.

But here is the uncomfortable part: Guimaras and Aklan are issuing entry bans based on zoning classifications from neighboring provinces. That is containment logic. There is almost nothing on early warning. In Iloilo, pig deaths in Dumangas were initially impossible to confirm as ASF because the animals had already been buried by their owners, making laboratory testing impossible. In Negros, Coscolluela noted the same gap in the RSSI response: “We do not have real-time data.” Two separate crises, two separate commodities, and the same broken surveillance infrastructure underneath both.

What the region needs is not another executive order. It needs sustained investment in the unglamorous work of early detection: barangay-level surveillance networks, rapid test kits in rural veterinary offices, real-time pest mapping that does not require a media briefing at the provincial capitol to reveal. The PHP 404 million mobilized against RSSI and the border checkpoints against ASF are necessary, but both are responses to fires already burning. The region keeps arriving late to its own emergencies, and that pattern will not change until the data systems catch up to the scale of the threat.