Starving in a surplus

Look at the latest figures from the Regional Development Council, and you’d be forgiven for thinking Western Visayas is an agricultural utopia. We are sitting on a rice self-sufficiency index of 127%. White corn is at a staggering 306%. We produce more pork and poultry than our population actually consumes.

Yet, try explaining that massive surplus to the 151,000 households in the region who remain classified as food poor. It is a bitter paradox. Our farms are full, but our neighbors’ plates are empty.

The state estimates that a family of five needs PHP 10,005 a month just to cover minimum food requirements. If we break this number down, that is roughly PHP 333 a day. Take PHP 333 to the local wet market right now. By the time you pay for a kilo of decent rice, what exactly is left? A few eggs, some leafy greens, maybe a tin of sardines. You certainly are not buying a cut of that celebrated regional pork.

This daily rationing has real, tragic consequences. Over 22,600 children in Region 6 are malnourished. Look at Antique, where the stunting prevalence is at 9.55%. Stunting is not just about physical height. It is permanent cognitive impairment. We are literally starving the potential of our next generation while surrounded by food.

So, who is to blame for this? Why are retail prices so divorced from farmgate realities? The disconnect happens in the missing middle. Local food is expensive because it changes hands too many times before it reaches the consumer. The gap between the farm and the table is swallowed by punishing logistics costs, a chronic lack of cold storage, and the inevitable layers of middlemen. The farmers who sweat in the fields are barely breaking even, while ordinary wage earners are priced out. It is a systemic distribution failure.

Even our agricultural successes are standing on shaky ground. We boast about a 171% poultry sufficiency rate, but those birds are largely fed on imported yellow corn. We rely heavily on outside regions and foreign imports for basic vegetables. Throw in our erratic climate – a single severe typhoon disrupting port operations – and that meat surplus could evaporate overnight. It is a fragile illusion of security.

We have to stop treating this solely as a production issue. The crops and the livestock are already there. The government is right to point out that affordability and access are our actual bottlenecks.

This demands a heavy lift from local government units. We need aggressive, sustained intervention in the supply chain – funding community-level cold storage, subsidizing transport so farmers can bypass trader cartels, and scaling up direct-to-consumer farm markets well beyond the occasional weekend pop-up.

The region does not just need better farming techniques. The real problem is not the harvest. It’s the broken system between the farm and the market. Until we fix how food moves from the soil to the local dinner table, all those impressive surplus percentages are nothing more than numbers on a page.