The Nueva Vizcaya Agricultural Terminal is home to one of the first interventions from the Department of Trade and Industry’s Supply Chain and Logistics Group. Alongside industry partners like SCMAP, there they introduced a system that would help NVAT’s customers – farmers from the province and beyond – directly find institutional buyers. For them, this means better earnings; for us, this means cheaper produce, if we know what to look for.
During this year’s Logistics Services Philippines Conference, the NVAT team had a space where they sold fresh produce at a really low cost. I may have treated myself to so many fruits and vegetables that I brought some home to my parents. But it’s not just those: one of the things I got was a bottle of tomato jam.
It’s an interesting product. Yes, tomato is a fruit, and by that logic, tomato jam should be a no-brainer. It’s good on plain bread, but it also plays well with more complex sandwiches. Tomatoes may be sweet at its best, but they also lend a nice umami complexity when cooked; in jam form, you somehow get both. I couldn’t help but think it can’t just be limited to sandwiches. Would tomato jam work well as a side sauce to a good slab of steak? I mean, we do mint jelly with lamb chops. Not an exact comparison, but it’s worth imagining. And besides, the Indians do different sorts of fruit chutneys, and this one bottle of tomato jam arguably is a chutney too. Unlock that idea, and the possibilities grow.
All that aside, though, tomato jam is a pretty nifty way to address the unpredictability of tomato harvests. We’ve seen, with alarming regularity, stories of farmers from up north having difficulty selling their bumper tomato crop, to the point that they either sell them for dirt cheap, give them away, or worse, throw them away as they get too ripe. Processing excess produce extends their shelf life, diversifies the product offering (and provides a new, higher-value revenue stream), and offers many new opportunities to sell our own produce to particularly adventurous customers.
Transforming our produce to high-value products is not a new idea, but of course it’s not instantaneous. It requires investment in equipment and know-how. It requires support from different stakeholders, to ensure the product is safe, viable, and appeals to its target market. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems our imagination is limited. Our quest for quick wins means we only focus on the low-hanging fruit – no pun intended – which, while it does work, still exposes us to various problems in the long run. Think back, again, to the oversupply of tomatoes, or carrots. We can buy them from the farmers, sure. But we can also teach the farmers – or, better yet, equip the community that hosts the farms – to not just rely on pushing out produce, but to also take some of them and turn them into interesting products that they can sell for higher prices.
Perhaps it’s also a matter of mindset. Maybe we also have to scrap the idea that high-value products should be widely available for them to be truly viable? Without even considering the high logistics costs in the country – at 27% our logistics costs are far, far higher than Indonesia’s, an archipelago that has twice as many islands – ensuring products are available across the Philippines is a huge undertaking a small producer can’t undertake unless it has scale, or heavyweight funders willing to take a gamble. And besides, some products are highly sought because of their scarcity, like the tibuok salt of Bohol, or perhaps even the Vjandep Pastel, which isn’t easy to buy if you’re not in Camiguin or Cagayan de Oro.
I’ve been thinking back on the government’s initiatives to address food security. The Department of Agriculture is now taking the lead in expanding our food logistics networks, particularly through establishing cold storage facilities in the regions. There is, of course, the DTI’s work aiming to lower logistics costs, and other public sector instrumentalities busy with expanding physical and digital infrastructure. Strategies that go beyond moving produce would make a good complement. It can lead to more market opportunities, bigger profits, and perhaps a push for our cuisine on the international stage. What a plus that would be, right? Imagine, South Korea already gets our bananas, but why can’t we offer our own take on banana milk to rival theirs? Oops, sorry, I may have gotten carried away with that one.
Henrik Batallones is the marketing and communications director of SCMAP, and editor-in-chief of its official publication, Supply Chain Philippines. More information about SCMAP is available at scmap.org.
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