ONE onion, $3.50. Avocado, $6.50. Carton of juice, $26. One bagel, $2.75.
Believe it or not, those are the prices in New York, the city that never sleeps where if you can make it there you can make it anywhere. For those aspiring to be king of the hill standing on top of the heap, America’s epicenter of the coronavirus epidemic is not the place to be, not now.
Ms. L’s daughter and son are trapped there. If she could get out of here and fly over there tonight, she would in a jiffy, but first stuff her suitcase with paper products, masks, disinfectants, which have all but flown off the shelves over there. If customs laws permit, also fruits and vegetables among her “pasalubong.” Says L, “Unbelievable, but we’re better off here.”
Hopefully it will stay that way. Local middlemen and distributors, retailers of agricultural produce are beginning to feel the squeeze from overstocking. Restaurants shut down for what looks like the unforeseeably long haul, quarantined consumers sans the disposable income to purchase in bulk, and given that vegetables are highly perishable and many homes own a TV instead of a ref, where’s their business headed? What’s the future of growers, suppliers, chefs? Restos on wheels, the new normal?
Speculating on the future of food, upper-middle class urbanites with a down-to-earth approach dream of turning themselves into weekend farmers, if only developers would convert vacant lots into farms.
“Balik Probinsiya” should engender a desire to turn/ return to the land as a green opportunity for a new life, normal or abnormal, for city folk. They could inject energy to the tribe of farmers who have been losing out to pestilence, seasonal extremes, problems with irrigation, mechanization, storage, urbanization, etc. Would Agriculture Secretary Dar dare ask for a partnership with the hardly visible, hardly heard-from agency that bears his name, DAR or Department of Agrarian Reform?
The next wave of trouble will be a worldwide food shortage. That’s not the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse talking, it’s data gatherers and the Food and Agricultural Organization sounding the alarm. We’re hungry for good news but it’s not enough to whine, pine, and dine on optimism. Government should put food on the table for urgent discussion, now.
