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Philippines Agribusiness Report Q2 2009
Business Monitor International, April 2009, Pages: 48
Philippines Agribusiness service provides proprietary medium term price forecasts for key commodities, including corn, wheat, rice, sugar, cocoa, coffee, soy and milk; in addition to newly-researched competitive intelligence on leading agribusiness producers, traders and suppliers; in-depth analysis of latest industry developments; and essential industry context on Philippines' agribusiness service.
In Philippines Agribusiness Report for Q2 2009 we introduce the new Business Environment section. This gives an overview of the agricultural and fisheries industry in the Philippines and its significance to the overall economy and labour market. We discuss the industry's key sectors including aquaculture and non-food agricultural products such as rubber. We also cover government support available to domestic agriculture.
The Philippine government will be hoping that 2009 is a quieter year for the country's agricultural sector than the one just passed. In 2008 headlines in the first half of the year were dominated by the rapid rise in the price of rice and worries about potential supply shortages. This year, the authorities were taking no chances and in January the government signed a government-to-government deal with Vietnam for the importation of 1.5mn tonnes of rice through the year, with the first 500,000 tonnes delivered in February. The National Food Agency is also increasing its domestic procurement of rice to be sure there are no supply shortages in the coming months. Despite the deal with Vietnam, the Department of Agriculture (DA) expects rice imports for the full year to be under 2.0mn tonnes, compared to 2.3mn tonnes in 2008.
Agricultural policy in the Philippines for the last couple of decades has been focused on moving towards self-sufficiency in key food crops such as rice. This has seen other potentially profitable avenues for agricultural growth somewhat neglected. This can be seen when comparing the state of agriculture in the Philippines with that in its neighbours Indonesia and Thailand, both of which are leading exporters of high-value products such as rubber, palm oil and shrimp. The Philippines, despite having a similar climate and geography, is only a minor producer of all these commodities.
The DA is hoping to change this and has ambitious plans in place for both the rubber and the aquacultural sectors. With the recent expansion of the cultivation of the Pacific white shrimp, for which a ban on imports was lifted at the beginning of 2007, we believe that the moribund shrimp farming sector will see strong growth in the coming years. Production of white shrimp in Thailand grew from virtually nothing to over 400,000 tonnes in little over five years, boding well for the DA's plans to lift shrimp production to 100,000 tonnes within another five years from it's current 54,000 tonnes.
Whether the DA's plans to encourage growth in high-value agriculture remains to be seen. In the overpopulated and food-deficit Philippines, these projects could easily be discarded for a continuation of the policy of focusing the majority of support into rice production. In doing so, however, the government would be overlooking a potentially valuable export earner.
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