Agriculture Assistant Secretary Salvador Salacup said there have been no hikes in the prices of vegetables and rice, as well as pork and poultry, despite warnings of food shortage and fuel price hike due to tightening supply of oil from the restive Middle East. The prices of sugar and onions have gone down.
“Agricultural commodities are very stable. We see movements on the positive side,” he said in a phone interview on Tuesday.
“The on-going milling of sugar eased the supply shortfall experienced in the previous months. The supply improvements accounted for the P3-per-kilogram price cuts at wholesale for both refined and brown sugar,” the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) said.
The agency based its observation on the prices of commodities for the week ending on March 4. It added that the price of onion had gone down due to large supply in the markets.
White onion price was off by P5 per kilogram from the P30 prevailing price last week, while Red Creole was sold at P42 per kilogram, cheaper by P28 compared to last week’s quotation,” BAS said.
Although certain factors could affect the prices of commodities, these had been offset by low demand, Salacup explained. “Even if they increase, it won't be as much because demand is low,” he said.
This was also the observation of the BAS. “Prices of basic food items such as rice, chicken, meat and cooking oil remained stable” because of “sufficient supply coupled with slow market absorption,” the agency said.
The product that could see a price increase is cooking oil, Salacup said. This was due to the reduced volume of copra, which went down by 5%, due to the extremely dry weather that affected the country last year caused by the tail end of El Nino.
“The PCA [Philippine Coconut Authority] said the coconut trees might recover by the rainy season by May or June. That will be the time when the trees will rehabilitate,” Salacup said.
As to rice, the country's main commodity, lawmakers on Monday urged the government to stockpile immediately to avoid higher import prices.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) recently said the global cereal supply will tighten this year due to growing demand and poor harvests. As such, there has been a surge in global cereal prices in the export market, with prices of major grains up by at least 70 percent from February 2010, FAO said.
The NFA, on Monday, said it will import 860,000 metric tons of rice for 2011. The agency said it is eyeing to buy rice from abroad sometime this month.
FAO recently revealed that food prices have gone up to record-highs due to increasing demand, high oil prices, and poor production yield.
The UN Food and Agricultural Organization Food Price Index averaged 236 points in February 2011, up 2.2 percent from January and the highest (in both real and nominal terms) since January 1990, when the UN started the measurement.
The index, which has been registering new highs for the past eight months, breached the 213.5 points recorded in June 2008 at the height of the food crisis.
According to the UN, prices of major staples such as grains, rice, wheat, maize have been rising since last year. The FAO Cereal Price Index averaged 254 points in February, up 3.7 percent from January and the highest since July 2008.
Of all the commodities monitored – dairy, oils and fats, meat, and sugar – only the sugar sector saw a slight decrease. The rest registered price increases. For the latest updates PRESS CTR + D or visit Stock Market news Today
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