214,215 WFP price observations across 62 foods and 97 markets. The file runs from 2000, but only 2 commodities run the whole way — so every rate here is scoped to its own span, and the two that share all 25 years disagree by a factor of 2.23.
Pork rose 299.9% between 2000 and 2025. Rice, over the identical 25 years, rose 134.2% — a factor of 2.23. They are the only two commodities in the file that span the whole record, which is why they are the only two compared this way.
When a commodity first appears in the file. This is the single most important thing about the dataset, and it governs every other figure on this page: a rate computed over the 2020 cohort covers five years including the 2022-23 spike, and cannot be ranked against a twenty-five-year rate.
Commodities: pork and two rice grades. Two of the three are still priced today.
The staple vegetables and meats. With the first cohort this gives 14 commodities with at least 18 years.
74.2% of the basket, with six years each. Long enough to price a shock, too short to price a trend.
The two series that share the full record. Both are staples, both are priced in every region, and they behaved completely differently.
₱89.60 to ₱358.33 a kilo, a compound 5.7% a year.
₱18.00 to ₱42.16, a compound 3.46% a year — and rice is the country's price-controlled staple, which is part of why.
Pork's rise over rice's, across identical years. A household that ate the same food throughout faced very different inflation depending which staple it leaned on.
Every commodity twice: its price change in pesos, and the same change in dollars. The distance between the two bars is not about food at all — it is the peso losing value against the dollar over the same period.
Over 25 years.
The same pork, the same years. The 106.9-point gap is exchange rate, not agriculture.
Commodities whose peso price rose or held while their dollar price fell. 10 fell in dollars altogether.
Red onions, month by month, with pork on the same axis for scale. This is the clearest single event in the file and it needs no interpretation — the prices are simply there.
Per kilo, national median, 2023-01. Up from 106.25 seven months earlier, a factor of 4.59.
Pork was ₱313.38 a kilo that month. Onions cost more.
The dearest market that month asked 617.5 and the cheapest ₱116.54. By April it was back to ₱152.50 nationally.
The 14 commodities with at least 18 years of prices, ranked. The 2020 cohort is deliberately excluded: a five-year rate beginning in 2020 is not the same measurement and ranking them together would put every recent arrival at the top.
Fastest of the 14, at 5.7% compounded.
Slowest. Over 18 years that is barely ahead of holding still in nominal terms, and behind it in real ones.
Median change by WFP category: vegetables and fruits against cereals and tubers, which is the category rice sits in.
Median rice price by region in 2025. The ordering is not the one most people would guess, and the reason is that rice moves from where it is grown to where it is not.
Dearest of the 17 regions.
Cheapest — Cagayan Valley, which grows a lot of it. A 26.5% spread across the country.
5th cheapest of 17. The capital is not where rice costs most.
Four limits, three of them asserted by checks so they cannot quietly stop being true.
WFP prices carry no household consumption weights, so there is no way to say what a typical family's food bill did. Averaging 62 commodities would weight garlic like rice. Every figure here is about a named commodity, and a check asserts the weights column stays at zero.
A kilo of tomatoes in 2008 and a kilo in 2025 are treated as the same thing. They may not be. This is an assumption, not a measurement, and it is the standard one — but it means a price rise and a quality rise are indistinguishable here.
The file reaches June 2026. Ending a change figure there would compare six months against twelve and report part of the seasonal cycle as inflation. A check fails if any commodity's last year is later than 2025.
These are nominal pesos. General consumer inflation over the same period accounts for part of every rise on this page, and separating food inflation from it needs a CPI series this project does not carry. The dollar column in section 3 is a different adjustment — for the exchange rate, not for prices at home.
One derivation script over a file that was already in the repo.
wfp_food_prices_phl.csv, 31 MB and 234,015 rows, has been in data/ph-food-prices since the rice page was built. The previous version of this page published twenty-eight figures without opening it.
5,578 WFP aggregate rows are excluded because they are computed from the actual rows and counting both double-counts. 7,850 non-kilogramme rows are excluded because a per-unit price and a per-kilo price are different measurements. What remains is 214,215 observations.
A national price for a month is the median across markets, and an annual price is the median across that year's monthly observations. Means would let one market's outlier move a national figure, which in the onion months it would have done considerably.
No commodity is measured against a fixed 2000 baseline it does not have. Each row carries its own first and last year and the change between them, and a check verifies the change and the compound rate agree with those two endpoint prices.
The peso fell against the dollar across this whole period, so every commodity's rise in pesos must exceed its rise in dollars. A check fails on any crossing, because that would mean the two currency columns had been swapped — which is not the kind of error that looks wrong on a chart.
Both read the same 31 MB source, so they share data/ph-food-prices rather than keeping two copies. Fact keys beginning food. belong here; keys beginning rice. belong to the rice page.
Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in
data/ph-food-prices/. Each is checked against its source query on every
build.
Retail and wholesale rice prices by market and variety, 2000-2020 — WFP's market monitoring redistributed by the Humanitarian Data Exchange
Daily NCR retail and wholesale rice prices, 2018 onward — Department of Agriculture daily price bulletins; parsed from PDF
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I wrote a companion post — “Onions Cost More Than Pork, And Only Two Foods Have The Full 26 Years” — in simple, everyday words.