A bird flu epidemic will bring PH agriculture to its knees
Credit to Author: Marlen V. Ronquillo| Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2020 18:12:15 +0000
Forget beef. Beef consumption per capita of Filipinos is one of the lowest in the world, under 4 kilos per year. The reasons are many, but these reasons all lead to one common denominator — beef is costly and the average Filipino family does not have the money to buy real beef, not the adulterated beef that stuff our pint-sized burgers. Many of our local food processors use carabeef and that does not count.
(To those who swear we live in a “Golden Age,” can you please show me a would-be-tiger economy with an under 4-kilo beef consumption per capita?)
We have no beef raising culture either and the reason is obvious. Our land area is about the size of New Mexico, and the vast spreads for grazing in a land-short area of more than 108 million people are non-existent.
About 30 years ago, there was an effort to import feeder cattle from Australia and raise them up in barns till slaughter age, our own version of cattle fattening/raising. The problem was this: the raisers needed real capital just to fatten 100 feeders, with a combination of grass cuttings and throwaway from the breweries. The land area required for fattening 100 feeders is about the same size of a modern, tunnel ventilated poultry house with a capacity of 35,000 broilers that are ready for the market after 32 to 35 days (gone are the 42-day raising cycles). Just 100 feeders can overwhelm a raiser with the cow dung. Chicken droppings have many uses and many buyers. None for cow dung and that environmental problem was one of the many reasons cattle fattening did not really take off.
So, other than fish, fruits and vegetables, the basic food intake of Filipinos on a daily basis is a trinity of rice, pork and chicken. The rice and pork sectors are in deep trouble. Trouble is brewing on the chicken sub-sector, as well.
The Rice Tariffication Law that Congress passed one year ago this month led to what we now call “unli” imports and this reckless importation, in turn, led to the largest rice stockpile in the country’s rice-eating history. While the reckless importations tamed inflation and guaranteed adequate rice supply, it came at the expense of 3 million rice farmers, who were meted a death sentence by the law. The law was based on the untenable and false assumption that there will be always rice to import on the global market. You can kill the local rice farmers, and rice will keep on coming and come cheap. The first few weeks of 2020 proved that assumption wrong.
In the first few weeks of 2020, the rice-importing world just woke up to the reality that the global rice market is very thin (more or less 6 million metric tons a year) and very unstable — although this reality has yet to sink in truth-averse Philippines.
Vietnam and Thailand are cutting both their paddy productions and the acreage devoted to rice. And Vietnam was the same country that shipped 2.1 million metric tons of rice to the Philippines last year.
A production cut in either China or India will send rice supplies short and global market prices will spiral. In that scenario, the Philippines will be the biggest loser. It cannot compete for available rice, and its own rice industry has collapsed due to the rice tariff law.
The African swine fever (ASF), the most lethal virus that can attack a country’s hog industry, came from tainted meat from China, and it has ravaged the country’s P280-billion-a-year hog industry, the eighth largest in the world. Before September last year, an area in the Porac-Angeles City-Magalang in my province of Pampanga was considered one of the most prodigious hog raising centers in the country. In just four months, ASF has laid waste the thriving hog farms, with a capacity of 1,000 (100-sow level) to 20,000 (2,000 sow-level). “Carnage” is to understated a word to describe what happened in this former hog production center. There is no help from the Department of Agriculture either.
As most things related to agriculture, farmers and raisers are left to fend for themselves when calamities strike.
We don’t have data on the level of the ASF impunity, as the Philippine Statistics Authority is loath to report bad things. There is no news on the casualty count in Region 4A or Calabarzon (Cavite, Laguna, Batangas, Rizal and Quezon), which is the biggest hog producing area. But if we were to use the China epidemic as gauge, 40 percent of China’s more than 400 million hogs were wiped out in the ASF rampage at a cost of $141 billion.
The brutal wages of the ASF epidemic are for real. At present, it is wiping out small farms in the Davao areas.
For chicken raisers in the country, from those doing grow-outs for the agribusiness giants to the independent raisers mostly with capacities of 100,000 broilers per the 32-day cycle, there is news worse than the first corona virus death in the Philippines — a broiler farm in Hunan province infected with the lethal bird flu, the deadly H5N1 pathogenic strain.
If this spreads to the country like the ASF, there is no known biosecurity measure that can be adopted by local broiler raisers to contain the deadly bird flu. This is a killer disease and can kill quickly with the same speed and impunity that enabled ASF to wipe out a substantive part of the hog industry.
I can deeply feel the level of worry. I used to raise broilers (65,000 birds when a raising cycle meant 42 days), but what killed me was the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991, not a deadly pathogen. The H5N1 avian influenza, should it spread into the country, will just be as lethal as a volcanic eruption.
The spread of that deadly pathogen is the last thing the country’s agriculture sector needs. Our food needs revolve around the trinity of rice, pork and chicken. The first two had been savaged. The chicken sector is now facing an existential threat.
Forget the Agriculture department. As an institution, it is a joke. William Dar with his doctorate — he is a bigger joke.