‘Cut onion harvest losses to boost local supply’
MINIMIZING waste and postharvest losses in the onion value chain, which could reach as high as 30 percent, would allow the Philippines to reduce its reliance on imports.
Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) Spokesperson Jose Diego E. Roxas said local onion output would have been nearly sufficient to meet domestic demand if the country had “better postharvest conditions.”
Roxas noted that postharvest losses in onion production range from a low of 8 percent to as much as 30 percent of total harvest.
“As much as we want to reduce our postharvest losses, it is impossible to have absolutely no postharvest losses. We could reduce the losses significantly but not absolutely,” he told reporters in an interview on Wednesday.
The Department of Agriculture (DA) said the country lost 100,000 metric tons (MT) of onions in 2022 alone due to the lack of proper postharvest facilities, such as cold storage facilities, and improper handling.
The total volume wasted was almost 35 percent of the 283,172 MT of red and yellow onions and shallots harvested by farmers last year. The country’s total onion requirement, meanwhile, was estimated at 260,148 MT or about 21,679 MT per month, according to the DA.
Because of this, no less than President Marcos Jr., who is the concurrent agriculture secretary, proposed the establishment of a program that would improve the domestic onion industry, including the development of better postharvest facilities.
The proposal, dubbed Optimization and Resiliency In the Onion Industry Network (ORION) program, is still being discussed by government officials.
“Down the line we will not just focus on reducing post-harvest losses but also increasing mechanization to reduce labor costs and improve farmers’ yield through high-yielding varieties,” Roxas said.
This year, the government has allocated P240 million to establish cold storage facilities for onions.
The Cold Chain Association of the Philippines (CCAP) had estimated that at least P6 billion is needed to double the industry’s storage capacity for onions and slash the disparity between the total supply annually and storage capacity. (Related story: https://businessmirror.com.ph/2023/01/24/expanding-onion-cold-chaincapacity-to-cost%e2%82%a76b-group/)
CCAP President Anthony S. Dizon said the estimated capacity of cold storage facilities for onions is about 100,000 MT, or only 27 percent of the annual supply of 360,000 MT.
“There is an obvious disparity between demand and capacity,” Dizon told reporters in a press briefing on Monday.
To meet the storage needs of the onion sector, Dizon said total cold storage capacity nationwide must be doubled to 200,000 MT. He said, however, that the private sector alone cannot do this and that the government must help via “fiscal interventions.”
Dizon said a cold storage facility with a capacity of 2,500 MT of onions cost about P150 million. To close the supply and cold storage capacity gap, a total of 40 cold storage facilities costing P6 billion must be built.
The country’s onion self-sufficiency ratio has been declining since 2019. In 2021, local onion production can only meet 68.2 percent of the country’s total requirement, the lowest level in three years, based on data from the Philippine Statistics Authority.