TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 12 July 2026)  — We like to explain expensive vegetables in the simplest possible way. A typhoon came. Fertilizer became costly. Traders manipulated supply. The road was bad. The farmer planted too little, or too much, or at the wrong time.

All of these can be true.

But there is another explanation that is less dramatic and more structural: many vegetables are already dying the moment they leave the farm.

In Mindanao, this is not theory. Anyone who has watched vegetables move from the uplands of Bukidnon, Davao del Sur, South Cotabato, or the highland barangays supplying Bangkerohan and Bulua knows the choreography. Harvest before dawn. Sorting under a shed. Packing in sacks, crates, baskets, or boxes. Loading into open or unrefrigerated vehicles. Waiting at consolidation points. Traveling through heat, dust, bruising, rain, and delay. Then another round of unloading, repacking, trimming, and display.

By the time the vegetable reaches the consumer, the price already contains a funeral cost.

The Department of Agriculture’s Vegetable Industry Roadmap cites postharvest losses of about 20 to 30 percent for highland vegetables, occurring during harvesting, trimming, packing, repacking, hauling, and transport. The same roadmap sets an ambitious target of reducing postharvest losses from 40 percent to 5 percent, which explains why some public discussions use the “up to 40 percent” figure.  

For Mindanao, the evidence is close to home. A 2023 loss assessment in selected markets in Davao del Sur, Bukidnon, and Cagayan de Oro documented vegetable losses linked to bacterial rot, fungal disease, bruising, cuts, breakage, wilting, and damage from bulk packing.   The World Bank has also described how vegetables from Davao Region commonly move to Bangkerohan Public Market in Davao City, while vegetables from Bukidnon and nearby production areas move to Bulua Public Market in Cagayan de Oro, both acting as major distribution hubs.  

This is where the cold-chain argument becomes persuasive.

A proper cold chain is not merely a big warehouse with air-conditioning. It is a sequence: pre-cooling near farms, refrigerated transport, cold storage at trading nodes and ports, and temperature-managed retail. The Philippine Food Chain Logistics Masterplan 2023–2033 identifies cold-chain infrastructure, efficient transportation, postharvest management, and food logistics integration as necessary parts of national food security.  

The problem is that most small vegetable farmers do not operate inside that system. They operate inside a warm chain.

The warm chain is cheaper upfront but costly in the end. A tomato bruised in transit softens. Cabbage packed too tightly wilts and rots. Eggplant suffers cuts and physiological damage. Leafy vegetables lose freshness quickly. Traders trim away damaged portions. Retailers raise prices to recover shrinkage. Consumers pay more for what survives.

So yes, cold-chain weakness is an invisible tax. It taxes the farmer through rejected or discounted produce. It taxes the trader through spoilage. It taxes the consumer through higher prices. It taxes the country through wasted land, labor, water, fertilizer, fuel, and time.

But balance is important. It would be too neat to say cold chain is the single greatest destroyer of agricultural wealth. In Mindanao, the vegetable problem is also about farm-to-market roads, fragmented production, weak farmer aggregation, limited working capital, price volatility, middleman dependence, poor packaging, pest and disease pressure, weather shocks, and the absence of reliable market information. Cold storage cannot fix a washed-out road. Refrigerated trucks cannot rescue farmers who planted without a buyer. Pre-cooling cannot solve cartel behavior or import timing.

Still, cold chain may be one of the most neglected parts of the solution because it is not as photogenic as planting. Politicians like seed distribution. Agencies like production targets. Groundbreakings are easier to explain than postharvest systems. Yet food security is not achieved when a crop is planted. It is achieved when food reaches households in edible, affordable condition.

For Mindanao, the lesson is practical.

Vegetable policy should move from “produce more” to “lose less.” That means investing in small and shared pre-cooling facilities near production clusters; solar or hybrid cold rooms where grid power is unreliable; better crates instead of crushing bulk sacks; cold rooms in trading posts like Bulua and Bangkerohan; refrigerated consolidation for long-haul routes; and farmer cooperatives strong enough to aggregate volume and bargain for logistics services.

The goal is not to industrialize farmers out of existence. It is to stop forcing them to carry the cost of a broken system.

A farmer who loses 25 percent of a harvest does not only lose vegetables. He loses school money, debt payment, fertilizer capital, and the courage to plant again. A consumer who pays more in Metro Manila or Cagayan de Oro is not only paying for cabbage or tomato. She is paying for heat, delay, bruising, and waste.

The harvest does not end at the farm gate.

In Mindanao, it must survive the road.

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. South of the 8th Parallel is a reflective civic column written from the vantage point of a Mindanao-born senior who has lived the arc from Ozamiz to Cotabato, Davao, Manila, Cagayan de Oro, and now Taguig. The 8th Parallel North is the line of latitude eight degrees above the Equator that runs across Mindanao, placing the island firmly in the tropical belt and slightly removed from the country’s political center. Rooted in memory yet attentive to policy, the column examines Mindanao’s concerns—governance, development, peace, inequality, migration, faith, and aging—with the steadiness of lived experience. This is not a view from the capital looking south, but a life shaped by the South looking outward, seeking perspective over noise and endurance over spectacle.)