Dennis Gasgonia

Article (news)

Raine Musñgi

ABS-CBN News

Farmgate hog prices have crashed. Executive Order 116 threw open the pork import gates. So why does a kilo of liempo still feel like a luxury item at the palengke? According to Jesus Cham, President Emeritus of the Meat Importers and Traders Association (MITA), the answer has less to do with supply than with something he calls &quot;sticky&quot; pricing, and it may be the single most important thing missing from the national conversation about EO 116. &quot;When price comes up, it becomes very sticky,&quot; Cham said in an interview on ANC&#x27;s Business Outlook. &quot;And there has to be a real, very, very good reason for it to come down.&quot; Cham explained that prices only fall once retailers are convinced the relief is permanent, not once farmgate numbers dip. &quot;It will come down if there is supply, there is price pressure, and the retailer sees, okay, it&#x27;s going to come down long term,&quot; he said. &quot;If the retailer says, no, this is just a blip, I&#x27;ll just wait it out, okay, it&#x27;s not going to come down.&quot; That&#x27;s a quiet but direct challenge to the assumption baked into EO 116 itself, which more than tripled the pork minimum access volume, from 54,210 metric tons to 204,210 MT, specifically to &quot;ensure adequate and affordable food for consumers&quot; and &quot;mitigate inflationary pressures.&quot; Retailers, restaurants, and supermarkets don&#x27;t reprice the day farmgate numbers move. <div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/business/2026/5/22/marcos-oks-higher-minimum-access-value-for-pork-0942">Marcos allows more pork imports as African swine fever impacts domestic supply </a> </div>&quot;You don&#x27;t go to a supermarket and say, hey, it went down, you should also go down, okay?&quot; Cham said Can government even deliver the pork it&#x27;s promising? Here&#x27;s where it gets more complicated. A meaningful share of the newly expanded quota, roughly 120,000 MT by Cham&#x27;s own account, has been earmarked for the state trading enterprise FTI, largely to stock Kadiwa outlets Cham questions whether that&#x27;s realistic on the ground. &quot;Kadiwa can absorb rice, because rice is ambient. You don&#x27;t need to handle it,&quot; he said. &quot;Frozen pork is different. You need temperature control rooms. You need equipment, facilities to cut, to repack, to portion. It&#x27;s a totally different animal.&quot; To be fair, this isn&#x27;t a blind spot government has completely ignored. The Department of Agriculture switched on its first completed mega cold storage warehouse in Pili, Camarines Sur this past March, a P500-million facility with temperature-controlled rooms built specifically for pork, beef, poultry, fish, and produce. But its annual capacity across all those categories combined is roughly 200,000 MT, and it&#x27;s one facility serving Bicol, the Visayas, and parts of Mindanao. Similar hubs planned for Taguig, Cabanatuan, Occidental Mindoro, and Isabela are still in the pipeline, not yet operating. Industry data from the Cold Chain Association of the Philippines puts the country&#x27;s entire cold chain capacity at around 500,000 tons nationwide, across every product category, not just pork. Stack that against a pork quota expansion alone that&#x27;s meant to move 204,210 MT a year, on top of whatever&#x27;s already moving through commercial channels, and the mismatch becomes obvious. So this isn&#x27;t a case of regulators ignoring the cold-chain question outright. It&#x27;s more that the buildout is still regional, still partial, and still years away from matching the volume EO 116 just authorized. Whether that gap closes fast enough to matter is the part nobody in government has spelled out yet.<div><a href="https://www.abs-cbn.com/news/business/2026/4/13/farm-groups-oppose-proposed-tariff-cuts-on-pork-chicken-corn-imports-2016">Agri groups oppose tariff cuts on pork, chicken, corn imports </a> </div><div> </div><div>FEEDING THE WORLD&#x27;S DEMAND, STARVING IT&#x27;S OWN APPETITE</div>Here&#x27;s the part of this story that stings the most. The Philippines isn&#x27;t a bystander in global pork markets, it&#x27;s one of the reasons those markets are growing at all. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization&#x27;s latest Food Outlook report named the Philippines, alongside South Korea and Mexico, as one of the three countries primarily driving global pork demand growth, with worldwide pork trade projected to expand 2 percent to 10 million MT this year. The FAO forecasts Philippine meat imports will hit a record 1.71 million MT in carcass weight equivalent for 2026, up 13.3 percent from 2025. And the volumes keep climbing. The latest Bureau of Customs data, released just last week, show meat imports up 22 percent for the January to May stretch of 2026, with pork imports alone reaching 395,022 MT, a 23-percent jump from 319,665 MT in the same window last year. Chicken imports rose 19 percent and beef climbed 21 percent over the same period. Roughly three-fourths of everything coming in, about 545,000 MT, arrived as frozen cuts, according to the House&#x27;s Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department (CPBRD). Those imports have also become real money for government.CPBRD figures show the Bureau of Customs collected a record P22.45 billion in tariffs and VAT from meat imports in 2025 alone, up 30 percent from P17.3 billion in 2024, with pork contributing the single biggest chunk at P12.72 billion. Halfway through 2026, that engine is still running: BOC had already banked P10.47 billion in meat-related tariff and VAT revenue by the end of May. But Cham says none of that boom is reaching the average dinner table. &quot;I&#x27;m sure a lot of consumers have cut back on their meat, because, I mean, it&#x27;s so expensive,&quot; he said. &quot;Pork has not been affordable ever since. Even in the 1990s, we were saying already that pork is a rich man&#x27;s meat.&quot; So the country is importing more pork than it ever has, generating more government revenue than it ever has, and still watching its own population eat less of it. That&#x27;s not really a supply crisis. It&#x27;s an affordability crisis wearing a supply crisis&#x27;s clothes. It&#x27;s not just how much pork Filipinos import, it&#x27;s what kindThere&#x27;s a quieter shift buried in the numbers, and Cham says it hasn&#x27;t gotten nearly enough attention. Before African Swine Fever hit in 2019, roughly 70 percent of pork imports were low-value by-products, offal, liver, jowls, because those carried just a 10-percent duty versus 30 percent on actual meat cuts. &quot;So if you look at the stats... 70 percent of the imports were the by-products. 30 percent was meat,&quot; Cham said.Once tariffs flattened to a 15 to 25 percent range across categories, that ratio started to invert. &quot;Now even some meat is overtaking the offal,&quot; he said, meaning &quot;the people are getting more quality protein&quot; than before. National figures back this up. Bureau of Animal Industry data for 2025 show pork cuts at 358,880 MT versus offal at 267,774 MT, meat clearly ahead now, a reversal from the pre-ASF pattern Cham described. It isn&#x27;t the industry&#x27;s first attempt to engineer a better outcome for Filipino consumers, either. Two decades ago, after a 2004 farmgate price collapse, Cham&#x27;s association trained hog raisers across Negros, Bacolod, Naga, Davao, and GenSan to pack and freeze meat to export standards, even shipping cartons up from Manila because local producers &quot;had no cartons for frozen meat. They only had cartons for bananas.&quot; The program, nicknamed &quot;pork in a box,&quot; folded after a change in DA leadership following the 2004 elections, right around the last window when Philippine hog prices were still competitive on the world stage.The real question isn&#x27;t imports. It&#x27;s whether the industry ever recovers.That history matters because it points straight at the deeper, still-unresolved issue underneath EO 116: whether imports are a bridge while the local hog industry heals, or a permanent replacement for an industry that has never really recovered from ASF. &quot;From 2019 down to today, hog production dropped by nearly 50 percent,&quot; Cham said. &quot;Today&#x27;s production level is equivalent to... 1994.&quot;The math is brutal: &quot;Our peak was 2019. So it took 24 years to hit our peak, which we lost in five, six years.&quot; That&#x27;s the core of Cham&#x27;s argument for expanding the MAV in the first place, not to replace producers, but because it&#x27;s &quot;unrealistic&quot; to expect them to rebuild in three to five years what took a quarter-century to grow. What EO 116 still doesn&#x27;t settle is whether government is using imports as genuine breathing room for that rebuild, or quietly letting cheap, high-volume imports become the permanent substitute for ever finishing it.<div><iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/90LnooKKQVE?&amp;wmode=opaque&amp;rel=0" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" class="fr-draggable"></iframe> </div>

The Philippines is now among the world's top 3 drivers of global pork demand, yet many Filipino households say they're eating less of it because they simply can't afford it.

The Philippines is now among the world's top 3 drivers of global pork demand, yet many Filipino households say they're eating less of it because they simply can't afford it.

Sticky pork: Why prices may not drop even if hog prices crash

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Sticky pork: Why prices may not drop even if hog prices crash

Raine Musñgi,

ABS-CBN News

Published July 18, 2026 04:53 PM PHT

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Pork prices

DA

Kadiwa

Jesus Cham

President Emeritus of the Meat Importers and Traders Association

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