Stop onion smuggling, gov’t urged

The government must intervene immediately to stop the smuggling of onion, which has caused the local farmgate price to whither by as much as 60 percent in just one week to just about P11 per kilo, according to an umbrella group of agriculture organizations.

The Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura (Sinag) said that based on its monitoring of major markets across the nation, red onion as of last weekend was being sold at P16 a kilo and white onion just P11 a kilo.

Respectively, farmgate prices have eroded from P36 and P15 from the previous weekend. A month ago, red onion was priced P40 and white onion P20 per kilo.

Sinag blames “rampant smuggling” for the drastic cuts in farmgate prices of onions, which it said should not happen considering that the harvest season is just about to start.

“We have not begun harvesting but warehouses are already full of smuggled onions, who would buy our produce?” said Berting Dimalanta, a leader of onion growers who are members of Sinag.

Dimalanta said the problem was threatening the livelihood of thousands of onion growers in Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija and the Ilocos region.

“The situation is forcing us to sell at a loss,” Dimalanta said in a statement.

Sinag cites information that, in the last four months of 2013, 8.8 million kilos or 400,000 bags or of white onions were reportedly brought in from New Zealand and The Netherlands.

“We call on the government to intervene at the farmgate and help the local onion growers,” Sinag chair Rosendo So said. “We are also interested to know what happened to previous onion smuggling cases filed by the Bureau of Customs (BOC).”

The group wants the Senate committee on agriculture to immediately investigate onion smuggling, hopefully to achieve similar results as its probe on rice smuggling.