Philippine's garlic prices go sky-high

Following a recent spike in onion prices in the Philippines, the same phenomenon is now happening for another essential vegetable. This time, it is garlic that has seen a sharp increase in retail prices, with locally grown and harvested bulbs selling for 400 Philippine pesos ($7.25) per kilogram — over two-thirds of the daily minimum wage. According to the Philippine Department of Agriculture, the reason for the sky-high prices of domestically grown garlic is its limited availability, which has “significantly shrunk as last year’s supply was ‘almost used up’ by the series of holidays of December.” At the same time, the figures demonstrate that locally grown bulbs are not the main source of the market supply and that the Philippine demand for garlic has not been covered by local production in recent years. This raises the question of what really triggered the rise in prices — did the stock of imported garlic thin out too? As early as last August, the Department of Agriculture ...