Farmers seek Session Road Sunday space
LA TRINIDAD, Benguet – Benguet farmers
and vegetable traders
Are reeling from low
prices because of lack of demand for the commodities.
Due to this, they asked
Baguio City officials to give them a space on Session Road to sell their
vegetable products which prices have spiraled down.
In a letter to Baguio
Mayor Benjamin Magalong and City Council, the League of Association at La
Trinidad Vegetable Trading Area Inc. appealed that they are given a “positive
gesture” in granting their request.
"We are aware that
the closure of Session Road for pedestrianization ended last December 2019, may
we again knock on you and your officialdom’s generosity and allow us to sell
highland vegetables for the four Sundays of this month of January 2020,” the
group said in the letter.
It was signed by
association president Nora Ganase and Hi-Land Farmers Multi-purpose Cooperative
manager Agot Balanoy.
Ganase and Balanoy hope
that by selling their produce on Session Road could “help create more demand
for the vegetables.”
Magalong had not acted
yet on the letter.
The two said the
wholesale rates of vegetables are low and even lower than that of the
production cost.
They cited as examples
the prices of cabbage and wombok (Chinese
cabbage) which have dipped to P3 a kilo, carrots down to P8, broccoli at P10
and chicharo (garden
pea) down to P25.
Carrots cost P40-P50 a
kilo at Divisoria in Manila, while cabbage costs P25, and chicharo is between
P100 to P150.
“Some farmers won’t
harvest anymore due to the high cost of transportation and just leave their
vegetables to rot in the farm,” the group said.
Balanoy said on Thursday
Tinoc, Ifugao cabbage growers, who have no vehicles, for instance, must pay
P3.50 a kilo to transport their produce to La Trinidad when it costs only P3 a
kilo to sell them.
She said the price does
not include the payment of porters who carry the baskets of produce from the
gardens to the nearest road.
“Just imagine if your
garden is far from the road, so you have to hire porters to bring your produce
to the road. That is another cost for the poor farmer,” she told the Philippine
News Agency (PNA).
Balanoy said rates are
low because of overproduction and the low demand of vegetables due to the late
planting as a result of the rains.
Vegetables should have
been harvested by December when the demand is high because of the holiday
season, but then, the harvest was delayed by a month and in January, demand is
low.
“It was because of the
typhoon (Onyok) which hit our country in September damaging the planted
vegetables, so planting was done in October only,” she said.
“Although we expected
that there will be problems like overproduction and low demand. The farmers
were then ready to profitless or even not at all...I really do hope that the
city will allow us to use Session Road,” she said.
In August last year, the
city allowed the use of the main road for the selling of fruits from Davao, a
request made by then Agriculture Secretary Manny Piñol, who was appointed
chairperson of the Mindanao Development Authority.
Due to the expiration of
the experiment for the pedestrianization of Session on December 31, the City
Council has yet to decide whether it will grant the request for an extension.
The Hi-Land Farmers MPC
has more than 4,000 farmers-members from Benguet and in Tinoc, Ifugao and
Bauko, Mountain Province.
That is, however, barely
a scratch of the 130,000 farmers in Benguet alone, added Balanoy. (PNA)
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