Blindness: Era of Gold

that the consumption was expected to rise during the holidays and because of this mistake of resisting importations, vendors were greatly affected.

By ELOISSA MALIGAYA

Acountry full of force on blaming one of its departments by the decisions that they had made. The Philippines, despite being known to the world as a country with a land perfect for agriculture, is now struggling to meet the demand and the necessities of the public.

The Philippines is now known to the world as a country selling gold to their people. Consumers were in a heartbreak when one of their necessities in cooking foods and viands were priced on its peak at Php 700 per kilogram during the holiday season. However, not only the consumers were affected by this, vendors were also affected.

”Before the prices of onions increased, we could finish 1 sack of onions in one day, and that’s already marketable. Now that onions are expensive, we can only sell at least 2 kilos of onions in one day because it’s really expensive.” as said by John Michael P. Bello, a vegetable vendor that has been in the business for more than 10 years. Small vendors in the market are affected by these as not only that they are struggling to look for suppliers, if they do find one, it would cost a fortune for them to afford it.

Red onions are a primary contributor to the foods and viands in the Philippines. Because of this, the business sector is blaming the agriculture department for failing to make accurate supply projections despite warnings from the past year.

Agriculture officials forecasted possible shortages of onion as early as August. However, the Department of Agriculture (DA) resisted importations insisting that the existing supply would be sufficient, even as Philippine farmers had already warned

The same vendor from before, John Michael P. Bello even stated that ”if the DA (Department of Agriculture) accepted imports of onions, maybe the prices of the onions would not have been so high.”

He has also stated that the action of the government is slow. When they said they would decrease the prices of onions, they said there were already new harvests, instead of the prices decreasing, the prices instead increased.

With one blink, everything could change, one moment we’re happy and another moment we’re not. This is also applicable to what has happened to the Philippines.

One day harvests are abundant, the next day there’s a shortage, and even if they get new batches of harvests they are left to decay for they cost a fortune. Fortune to the point where consumers would rather have themselves suffer without it than taking out loads of money to buy a piece of an ingredient in their era where one meal could be gold. ■

By DOMINIQUE LLADOC and JACE ADRIEL YAP