Gov’t urged to act on high meat, chicken prices

The government should move to address an abnormal increase in retail prices of meat products when farmgate prices have been decreasing, according to the Samahang Industriya ng Agricultura (Sinag).

Citing results of its monitoring of prices in the past few weeks, the umbrella group of agribusiness operators, farmers and party-list groups said farmgate prices of chicken and hogs have dropped by P20-P23 a kilo while retail prices have even increased by P5-P10 a kilo.

Sinag chair Rosendo So said in an interview that while prices at the farm were typically lower than what consumers paid for—since the former excluded the cost of transport, handling, storage, marketing and profit margins—a price difference of almost a P100 was too much.

“At the current farmgate price of live hogs at P105-P115 a kilo, retail prices of pork should only be about P170-P175,” he said.

So added that, similarly, if chickens fetched P68-P73 a kilo at the farmgate, retail prices should be only around P110.

Data from Sinag showed that the retail price of pork was P220 a kilo while that for chicken meat was P150. For Sinag, the price of pork was about P45 too much and that of chicken was P37 too high.

Reacting to reported statements from meat importers about retail prices increasing by P10 a kilo because of the congestion in the ports of Manila, the Sinag chair said meat imports were mainly for meat processing and were not intended to be sold at local wet markets.

“Why should port congestion be a direct cause of any increase in the price of fresh meat?” So said.

He added that global quarantine regulations did not allow imported frozen meat to be sold at public markets considering that bacterial growth on meat that is thawing was “horrendously exponentially fast, posing hazard to public health safety.”

As for palay, Sinag observed that farmgate prices also decreased by P2 a kilo in the last two weeks. The group expects palay prices to decrease further in the coming weeks when farmers start their harvest.