Food Crisis Series 25
Yes, we can grow wheat in the Philippines
At one time before the EDSA Revolution, our farmers had started planting local wheat varieties developed by the Institute of Plant Breeding at UPLB. The variety Trigo 2 was for cakes and pastries, while Trigo 1 was for pandesal. Farmer cooperators in the Ilocos region, Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog, and also in the Visayas and Mindanao planted wheat on their ricefield as second crop under a packaged program initiated by DA, NFA, PCARRD and UPLB and other state universities. But all these ended up after the Edsa Revolution.
Dr Abe V Rotor
Wheat grain somewhat resembles the shape and form of coffee bean. Whole wheat contains high protein, nearly twice that of rice. Wheat flower resembles that of most grains, including rice, barley and rye.
Threshing wheat by hand, similar to rice. Threshing is much easier, and wheat stalk is kinder to the hand. The hay has higher nutrient value than rice, and is easier for animals to digest.
Author's son Marlo, then 5 years old, takes pride in displaying a freshly harvested wheat from a farmer's field.
Part 1 - Pandesal as poor man's food is fallacy
Pandesal as poor man's food is fallacy
The mother material - whole wheat grain - is imported from the United States by big companies which grouped themselves into the Philippine Association of Flour Millers, Inc. PAFMI mills the grain into flour and sell it to local bakers. The bran, the by-product of milling called pollard is an important ingredient of poultry and animal feeds. To augment this, the group also imports feed wheat.
Actually PAFMI (Philippine Association of Flour Millers) and PAFMI (Philippine Association of Feed Millers) are one. They produced wheat flour for bakery products, mainly pandesal (70 per cent of all bakery products). They formulate feeds from pollard and from feed wheat and dominate the local feed industry. They produce poultry, meat and meat products through their local contractors called integrators. And they directly import hotdog, hamburger, dairy products, and the like.
Here is a scenario for the pandesal consumer. Wheat comes from the prairies of North American covering the Dakotas, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri and a dozen more States, adjolining Canada. A state may be bigger than the Philippines in land area. The American farmer who cultivates hundreds, if not thousands, of acres using airplane and railway systems, plants his wheat either before winter (the germinated seed remains dormant or overwinters), or in the spring. Thus, when we import, we specify winter or spring wheat.
Generally spring hard wheat is preferred for pandesal, although it is more costly. We import the premium wheat, the best in the world. Just to make pandesal! The soft type of wheat (varieties with less of the leavening substance called gluten), is made into cakes, pastries and crackers. There is also the durum wheat or pasta, which is made into macaroni or spaghetti, also by the PAFMI members. They make those ready-in-two minutes and instant noodles, pancit canton, mami, soups, etc.
Now, where is my pandesal? Either it is shrinking or taking new shapes, or both. There are various versions of pandesal, with different product presentation and prices. That is why pandesal can not be standardized, and much more, socialized. How could it be a poor man’s breakfast? Where is the control button?
In the seventies wheat importation was in the hands of the National Grains Authority. It was decreed under PD 4 by the president, then President Ferdinand Marcos.
PAFMI and PAFMIL members received their allocations from NGA to mill and sell the products. The revenues were used to build warehouses and other post harvest facilities. NGA generated its own corporate funds, mainly from wheat importation, which was used to subsidize the small rice and corn farmers, and in carrying out the country's food self-sufficiency program. We soon became self-suffiency in rice and corn, and eventually the Philippines became a net rice exporter starting in 1975 and continued on to the early eighties. This was the golden era of the grain industry in the country.
The scenario has changed since the transfer of wheat importation into the hands of the private sector, principally PAFMI and PAFMIL. (Only rice was kept exclusively under direct government importation and control.) The wheat grain goes to the giant bins and mill complexes of the PAFMI/L members concentrated in Metro Manila, others in Cebu and Mindanao. It is safe to estimate that the total value of wheat and corn imported annually runs to billions of US$, and increasing every year. One can imagine the staggering figure if we include feed wheat and pollard, fish meal and soyabean meal which are also important feed ingredients.
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Let's take pork and beans as an example for analysis. At one time, white bean was tried in Mindanao. It did not grow true to type, because it is a temperate crop. So we continued to import the white bean, one hundred percent.
How about the tiny pork? It is produced locally but the corn used as feed came from Thailand. Comparatively it is cheaper to import corn than to cultivate it here. The tin can and label are also imported. (See part 3 below)
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Analogously, it is cheaper to import rice than to grow it here. No wonder the government imported on the average one million metric tons of rice yearly under the three previous administrations - and is likely that the present is going to do the same. And to think that the sources are Vietnam, a war-torn country, and Thailand which used to send its scientists and students to study rice production in UP and IRRI at Los Baños.
(Likewise, it is cheaper to buy corn from abroad than growing corn in Mindanao). Now where is the pandesal?
At one time before the EDSA Revolution, our farmers had started planting local wheat varieties developed by the Institute of Plant Breeding at UPLB. The variety Trigo 2 was for cakes and pastries, while Trigo 1 was for pandesal. Farmer cooperators in the Ilocos region, Central Luzon, Southern Tagalog, and also in the Visayas and Mindanao planted wheat on their ricefield as second crop under a packaged program initiated by DA, NFA, PCARRD and UPLB and other state universities.
But all these ended up after the Edsa Revolution.
Yes, we can grow wheat successfully in the Philippines. A further proof is that during the Spanish period, farmers in Cagayan down to Batangas were growing a wheat known as Cagayan Wheat. The local wheat was even shipped through the Galleon Trade. Cagayan wheat was mentioned in an autobiography of a Frenchmen, de Gironierre, “Half a Century in the Philippines.”
Part 2: Wheat production and consumption scenarios
As wheat farmer he gets a good average yield, as high as 3.11MT per hectare, higher than world’s average - comparatively profitable with other cash crops after rice. He uses the same farm (second crop after the rice season), same tools and equipment like irrigation, same techniques like fertilization, and post harvest processes. With the government support he is assured of both market and price of his produce. He produces also wheat bran and hay for his livestock, which are better than those of rice. With these he can raise poultry and livestock.
In this case he gets more protein - as high as 12 percent for whole wheat, 8 to 9 percent for regular flour. Rice has barely half protein level. He gets 75 percent starch, so with rice. But he gets gluten, the substance that makes wheat, and only wheat, naturally leavening. He gets also high crude fiber, oil, minerals and vitamins.
Triticale - a cross between wheat (Triticum) and rye (Secale)
Triticale was successfully grown on the Benguet in the seventies. Triticale combines the high yield potential and good grain quality of wheat with the disease and environmental tolerance (including soil conditions) of rye. It is grown mostly for forage or fodder although some triticale-based foods can be purchased at health food stores or are to be found in some breakfast cereals, bread and other food products such as cookies, pasta, and pizza dough. The protein content is higher than that of wheat although the gluten in fraction is less. The grain has also been stated to have higher levels of lysine than wheat. As a feed grain, triticale is already well established and of high economic importance. (Internet)
The Philippines has 22 flour mills scattered all over the country producing 83 million bags of flour annually or nearly seven million bags of flour per month.
PAFMIL member companies are RFM Corp. Wellington Flour Mills, Philippine Flour Mills, General Milling Corp. Liberty Flour Mills, Pilmico Foods Corp. and Universal Robina Corp.
Some 70 percent of production is hard flour which is used to produce, loaf bread and other bakery products, while 30 percent goes to the pastry, noodle and cake market.
The industry imports 95 percent of its wheat, the main raw material for flour from the US while the remaining requirement is sourced from Canada and Australia. This year, the Philippines is seen importing some 7.3 million metric tons of wheat, 2.6 percent lower than last year’s 7.5 million MT.
PAFMI is the biggest and oldest group of feed millers in the country with 35 members including Univet Nutrition and Animal Healthcare Company, Pilmico Foods Corp., Universal Robina Corp., Philippine Foremost Milling Company, General Milling Corporation, and Vitarich Corporation.
Philippine feed milling, an intermediate operation supporting the livestock, poultry, and aqua industries, produced a total volume of 18.98M metric tons, valued at 510B in 2019.
Top 10 Wheat Producing Countries (in tons of wheat produced 2020)*
China — 134,254,710.
India — 107,590,000.
Russia — 85,896,326.
United States — 49,690,680.
Canada — 35,183,000.
France — 30,144,110.
Pakistan — 25,247,511.
Ukraine — 24,912,350.
According to information supplied by Ricardo M. Pinca, the executive director of PAFMIL, flour milling in the Philippines started in the 17th century when Spanish missionaries introduced it for making Eucharistic wafers. Could this be the locally produced Cagayan Wheat the Earthman Society has been searching since the time of its chairman and founder, the late Mr Mario Chanco as far back as in the 60s?
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