Expert flags gaps on ‘rescue buys’ initiatives

An expert raised concerns about the growing trend of ‘rescue buys’, citing its long-term impact on farmers nationwide.

“It gets into people’s heads when you say it’s a rescue buy that you can buy it at less than the money that they’ve actually spent to grow the vegetable,” Agro-DigitalPH Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Henry James M. Sison said on the sidelines of BusinessWorld Insights last Thursday.

“Farming is a business where you actually have inputs that you buy, and there’s a certain degree of break-even prices,” he added. “If the farmer cannot sell at even the break-even price, they won’t have the money to plan for the next cycle.”

Rescue buy, as defined by Mr. Sison, is an unplanned bulk purchase of crops made by organizations and communities to bring produce to the market at supposedly discounted rates.

“Farmers can have residual values or at least better than farm gate prices compared to if they sell it on bagsakan [wholesale market],” he said.

“As of late, because of the lower prices of vegetables, a lot of people have been appealing to pity, saying that the farmers are pitiful because they don’t have a market of sorts,” he added.

While the intent is sound in principle, he noted that it could devalue farming as a profession. “When you perpetuate that type of mentality, that’s poverty porn for us,” Mr. Sison said. “We always tell farmers that there is dignity in what you do.”

Among the factors contributing to the rise of rescue buys are the lack of proper planning and coordination among farmers nationwide.

“What happens is when they produce at the same time, that’s a problem, and that usually happens,” Mr. Sison said. “For instance, there’s always a problem with tomatoes up north because every season they will plant tomatoes at roughly around the same time.”

“We tell them to plant something else or at least do not bet on the same crop all the time,” he added.

Apart from the supply glut, the fuel price hike also contributed to farmers’ dependence on organization-driven rescue purchases. “That’s the reason why it crashed because the middlemen who used to get food from Benguet stopped going there,” he said.

“If you want to change the system, it should have been the height of the fuel prices,” he added.

Oversupply and farmers’ dependence on rescue buys can be mitigated through a nationwide planting calendar.

“There should be a nationwide calendar planting,” Mr. Sison said.

“There has to be a certain degree of control to avoid all these supply gluts or lack of supply or under scarcity,” he added. “It’s like running an enterprise; you need to manage the resources that go in.”

Last May, the  House of Representatives launched a rescue-buy initiative to help farmers from the Cordilleras cope with rising farming costs. The two-day program offers fresh cabbage for only P20 per kilo to help move excess produce and support local farmers.

Senator Lorna Regina B. Legarda has also filed Senate Bill No. 2051, or the proposed Local Harvest Support Act of 2026, which aims to strengthen food security and protect the livelihoods of local farmers and fisherfolk amid rising fuel prices. — Almira Louise S. Martinez