This ‘hot commodity’ is being smuggled into Philippines — and you may have it at home
Authorities in the Philippines busted numerous smugglers attempting to bring an everyday staple food into the country. The item has become a “hot commodity” as domestic prices surge, according to Filipino officials.
At markets in the Philippines, onions are more expensive than meat — costing over three times more than chicken, according to a Jan 10 price monitoring news release from the country’s Department of Agriculture.
Onions cost more than a “daily minimum wage” in the country, CNN reported. The Philippines now has the “world’s most expensive domestic onion prices,” according to Joey Salceda, resident economist at the Philippine House of Representatives, per CNN.
And Filipino’s consume a lot of onions. On average, the nation consumes about 17,000 tons of onions monthly, the country’s agriculture assistant secretary Rex Estoperez told Bloomberg.
Recently, however, onion demand has greatly outpaced supply of the staple vegetable, sending prices soaring. Crop-ravaging super tycoons, soaring global inflation, inaccurate crop projections and local crises, such as “price manipulation” have contributed to raising onion prices, according to CNN, Bloomberg, and TIME.
The result? Onions have become a “hot commodity” for smugglers, Bureau of Customs Commissioner Yogi Filemon Ruiz said in a Dec. 31 news release from Philippine News Agency, the official state news outlet.
At the Port of Manila, border authorities seized about $310,500 worth of smuggled onions hidden in containers labeled as clothing, plastic buckets, dish plates and cat litter, according to a Jan. 4 news release.
Another shipment, labeled as udon noodles and frozen fish, contained about $2.5 million worth of smuggled agricultural products, including onions, border officials said in a Dec. 31 news release.
Authorities also seized smuggled onions worth about $365,000 from bread and pastry containers at the Port of Cagayan de Oro, a Dec. 24 news release said.
In an attempt to lower onion prices, officials in the Philippines plan to inspect the smuggled onions and release the vegetables to local markets, according to a Jan. 10 news release. A similar effort mid-December found that a shipment of smuggled onions was unfit for consumption due to bacteria traces, GMA News Online reported.
Other government response efforts include importing about 20,600 tons of onions by late January, calls for a task force to crack down on smuggling, CNN reported, and a price ceiling for onions, TIME reported.
This story was originally published January 10, 2023 at 1:55 PM with the headline "This ‘hot commodity’ is being smuggled into Philippines — and you may have it at home."
