Onions Cost More Than Pork, And Only Two Foods Have The Full 26 Years

In January 2023, onions in the Philippines cost more than pork.

Not a little more. Onions were ₱487.50 a kilo. Pork was ₱313.38.

One market was selling them at ₱617.50.

Seven months earlier they had been ₱106.25. So the price went up 4.59 times, in seven months, for a vegetable.

By April it was back down to ₱152.50. It was a spike, not a new normal. But it happened, and the numbers are all sitting in a file I have had on my computer for a year.

The File I Already Had

The World Food Programme collects food prices in the Philippines. 214,215 prices. 62 different foods. 97 markets. Every month since January 2000.

The old version of this page had 28 numbers on it. None of them came from this file. Nobody had opened it.

The First Thing It Told Me Was Bad News

"Since 2000" sounds great. 26 years of food prices!

Except only 2 of them actually go back that far.

3 start in January 2000. 11 more start in 2008. And 46 of them — 74.2 out of every 100 — only start in May 2020.

This matters more than it sounds. If I measure how fast a food's price grew over six years starting in 2020, I am measuring the 2022 price shock. If I measure over 25 years, I am measuring something else entirely.

Put those two numbers next to each other in a chart and the six-year ones win every time — not because those foods got more expensive, but because their window was shorter and worse timed.

So I did not put them next to each other.

Pork And Rice

Two foods have the whole 25 years. Both are things Filipino families eat constantly.

Pork went from ₱89.60 a kilo to ₱358.33. Up 299.9 per cent.

Rice went from ₱18.00 to ₱42.16. Up 134.2 per cent.

Same country. Same years. One rose more than twice as much as the other.

Which means "how much did food get more expensive" has no single answer. It depends what was on your plate.

The Trick With Dollars

Here is a thing I did not expect to find interesting.

The file lists every price twice — in pesos, and in US dollars.

Pork rose 299.9 per cent in pesos. In dollars, 193.0 per cent.

That is a gap of 106.9 points. And it has nothing to do with pigs.

It is the peso. Over those 25 years the peso got weaker against the dollar, so the same pork costs more pesos and fewer dollars than the peso number suggests.

8 foods in the file actually got cheaper in dollars while their peso price held or rose. Nothing about the food changed. The money did.

Vegetables Got Hit Hardest

Grouped by kind of food, the middle vegetable or fruit rose 46.9 per cent. The middle grain or root crop rose 18.8 per cent.

Rice is a grain. So the food the government works hardest to keep cheap is in the group that rose least. That is probably not a coincidence.

And One Thing That Surprised Me

I assumed Manila would be where rice costs most. Big city, everything expensive.

No. Metro Manila is the 5th cheapest of 17 regions, at ₱40.66 a kilo.

The most expensive is ARMM in Mindanao, at ₱44.56. The cheapest is Region II — Cagayan Valley — at ₱35.22.

Cagayan Valley grows a lot of rice. That is the whole explanation. Rice is cheapest where it comes out of the ground, and gets more expensive the further it has to travel.

Manila is expensive for many things. Rice is not one of them.