Imported Pork and Your Farmgate Price: What the Numbers Actually Say

On the published numbers, imports did not cause the 2026 farmgate slump, but they do cap how far your price can recover. Over sixteen years USDA's import series and PSA's backyard farmgate price rose together, a 0.98 correlation, and in the first half of 2026 domestic output grew about 6% while imports grew about 5%.

Ask any pig raiser in this country why the price is bad and you will get the same answer inside ten seconds. Imports.

It is the answer the trade bodies give, it is the answer the news gives, and it is an answer this site itself has printed more than once. So it seemed worth doing the obvious thing, which nobody appears to have done, and putting the two published series side by side.

They rise together. Sixteen years, and almost every time imports went up, the farmgate price went up too.

That is not a comfortable finding and I would rather it had come out the other way. It did not, so here is the whole thing, including the part where imports do genuinely hurt you, which is a different mechanism from the one everybody names.

The numbers everybody argues about

USDA's Foreign Agricultural Service maintains a Production, Supply and Distribution database that includes an annual Philippine swine meat balance. It is free, it is downloadable, and it is the only long-run import series anybody can check. This site publishes a copy of it with the retrieval date on every row.

Thousand tonnes carcass weight equivalent. The domestic-share column is my own arithmetic, and it is the line that matters: more than four kilos in ten now come from a port. In 2019 it was closer to one in eight.

That is a real, structural, permanent change in this industry and nobody should pretend otherwise.

The test nobody runs

Here is the thing though. If imports were what pushed farmgate prices down, then years with big imports should be years with bad prices. So put them side by side.

The farmgate column is the annual mean of PSA's household farmgate series, which is the backyard population and reaches back to January 2010.

Across all sixteen years the correlation between the two columns is 0.98. On year-on-year percentage changes, which is the harder and fairer test, it is 0.94. Thirteen of the fifteen annual moves go the same direction: imports up and price up, or imports down and price down.

Only 2016 and 2020 break the pattern, and neither breaks it in the direction the argument needs. In 2016 imports rose 11.6% and farmgate fell 3.0%. In 2020 imports fell 24.3% and farmgate rose 3.4%, which was ASF arriving and cutting supply while the pandemic shut the ports.

So what happened in 2026?

This is where the argument gets serious, because 2026 is the year everybody is actually angry about.

Farmgate fell hard. PSA's national all-farms average for the first half of 2026 came to about ₱174 a kilo against about ₱211 for the same half of 2025, down roughly 17%. That is a brutal year and nobody is disputing it.

And it did not stop in June. PSA has not published July, August or September yet (its next update is declared for 6 November 2026), and its last published quarter, Q2 2026, averaged ₱172.44 a kilo liveweight. Since then the DA told the Manila Times the national liveweight price was about ₱150 a kilo in August, against ₱215 in June 2025. Industry figures reported by BusinessMirror put Luzon at ₱153.72 for August and the Visayas and Mindanao at ₱131.66. By the Tariff Commission hearing on 12 October, industry sources quoted by BusinessMirror put the price at ₱100 to ₱120. Those are the DA's and the trade's numbers, not PSA's, and I keep them apart from the ₱172.44 on purpose: averaging an official quarter with a trade quote gives you a price nobody was ever paid. With production costs now put at ₱180 to ₱190 a kilo, every one of them is selling well below cost.

Now the two facts that decide the argument.

First: PSA's own production series went up. Quarterly pig production in liveweight tonnes rose 6.38% year on year in the first quarter of 2026 and 5.58% in the second. Domestic output was up about 6% across the half, from 793,681 to 841,206 tonnes on this site's copy of PSA's production series. Katrin Mares, assistant chief of the DA's Macro-Economic Policy Division, quoted those exact two totals at the Tariff Commission hearing (BusinessMirror, 12 October 2026), so this is not a number the department disputes. Look at that beside a 17% price fall and you do not need any imports at all to explain what happened. That is a supply curve doing exactly what a supply curve does.

Second: the 2026 import figure that does exist is modest. USDA's estimates are annual and the newest one is 2025. BAI publishes import clearances, and its count for January to August 2026 is 602,655 MT of pork, up about 5% on the 573,091 MT of the same months of 2025 (BAI via Philstar, 24 September 2026). That is product weight, not USDA's carcass weight, so it cannot go in the table above. But it says imports grew by about five per cent while domestic output grew by about six. More pork from both directions, into a market that did not grow to match. Imports added to the glut. They did not create it on their own.

The full-year number you will see quoted is 939 million kilos. That comes from the Pork Producers Federation of the Philippines, the Philippine Pork Council Alliance and allied groups, in an 8 October 2026 letter to the President that projects 2026 imports from BAI data "if the current trend continues" (Daily Tribune, 10 October 2026). It is the groups' projection, not a BAI forecast, and the letter does not show the working. For comparison, simply running the January to August pace out to twelve months gives about 904,000 MT, which is my own arithmetic. Either way it would beat 2025's record 851,760 MT. Notice what the gap between those two numbers assumes: that the last four months of the year import faster than the first eight, while the farmgate price is still falling. Possible, with Christmas buying. Not something I would print as a fact.

Third, for the months after June: the two explanations on offer are both partly about fear, not volume. The DA's Secretary Tiu Laurel has blamed an ASF-driven "fastbreak", raisers dumping pigs early before disease reached them, and points out that Mindanao's price fell despite few imports landing there (Daily Tribune, 7 September 2026). SINAG's Jayson Cainglet blames imports (BusinessMirror, 8 September 2026). Neither side has published a figure that settles it, and PSA's July to September farmgate numbers on 6 November will at least show how far the price actually fell, and where.

I want to be careful here, because there is a real argument on the other side and it deserves stating properly. Carryover stock is real. A record import year in 2025 leaves cold storage full going into 2026, and that inventory competes with your pig whether or not a single container lands this year. SINAG's chairman Rosendo So made exactly that point to Philstar in March 2026, arguing for imports to be cut to 550,000 tonnes from 850,000. USDA's own balance shows ending stocks of 86 thousand tonnes at the close of 2025, which is not nothing.

But 86 thousand tonnes of carryover against a domestic production rise of roughly 47 thousand tonnes in one half-year, in a market that consumes about 1,700 thousand tonnes a year, is a supporting actor. The 6% production rise is the story.

What imports genuinely do to you

Here is the mechanism that is real, and it is worse than the one people complain about, because it does not go away when the volumes fall.

Imported dressed pork lands cheap. SINAG put it at ₱80 to ₱100 a kilo in March 2026, with better cuts around ₱120. A local pig at PSA's June 2026 farmgate figure of ₱171.76 a kilo liveweight, the newest month PSA has published, works out to about ₱229 a kilo of carcass at a 75% dressing yield, which is the conversion I walked through separately in liveweight versus dressed weight. At the DA's August figure of ₱150 liveweight it is about ₱200.

Roughly two to one, either way. And So's own framing is the honest one: if a trader can buy dressed imported pork at ₱120 and resell at ₱150, that trader is not going to pay ₱200 to ₱229 for yours unless something forces them to.

That is a ceiling, and it is the correct thing to be angry about. It does not depend on this year's volume. It depends on the tariff being 15% and 25% instead of 30% and 40%, and on the MAV being what it is. When your farmgate price rises far enough that landed pork looks cheap by comparison, imports come in and cap you. When your price is already low, imports have less reason to come, because there is less margin in landing them.

Which is exactly the pattern the correlation shows, and exactly why imports have mostly risen in good years and not bad ones. 2026 is the awkward exception so far: BAI's count shows imports up about 5% into a falling market. Landed pork at ₱80 to ₱120 still undercuts even a ₱150 liveweight pig, and EO 116 widened the low-duty quota in May. That is the ceiling working at a lower height, not a different mechanism, and it is why the tariff argument has got louder this year.

The rules, in order, with dates

Most of what gets written about pork tariffs is wrong about which order did what. So, from the primary documents:

Two corrections worth making, because both are repeated constantly.

EO 62 did not cut the pork tariff. The cut to 15% and 25% happened in 2021 and was carried forward by EO 10 at the end of 2022. What EO 62 did in June 2024 was fold those rates into a five-year schedule running to 2028, which is arguably worse for producers because it removes the semestral review that used to give the industry a hearing twice a year. But it was not a cut, and describing it as one gets the fight aimed at the wrong year.

The ₱210 floor is not a floor. It was an industry-agreed target reached in a meeting and backed by the DA, with no instrument behind it, and the DA has no legal power to make it mandatory. The national average has never reached it since it was set. A handful of regions have, briefly: on PSA's regional series, the Cordillera in five months, BARMM and Central Visayas in two each, and Metro Manila once, in January 2026. Industry groups re-proposed it in September 2026, at a moment when the DA's own national figure was about ₱60 under it. Calling it a price floor in a business plan is how people end up with a plan that does not survive contact with a viajero.

Where the numbers disagree, and who disagrees

This is the part that gets skipped everywhere else, so here it is explicitly.

For 2025, USDA's PSD balance says production 975, imports 713, consumption 1,692, all in thousand tonnes carcass weight. Those are the October 2026 figures; USDA revised imports up from 708 and consumption up from 1,687, which moves the domestic share by two tenths of a point and the correlations above not at all. SINAG told Philstar in March 2026 that the country consumed 1.58 million tonnes of pork, produced 1.06 million and imported more than 851,000.

Those do not reconcile, and they are not supposed to. USDA works in carcass-weight equivalent and covers a defined set of swine meat categories. The 851,760-tonne figure that circulates in the Philippine press comes from BAI and DA import clearances in product weight, which includes offal and mechanically deboned meat that USDA's balance handles differently. Neither is wrong. They are answering different questions.

The other genuine disagreement is about what to do. SINAG, the National Federation of Hog Farmers and PROPORK want the pre-2021 structure back, 30% in-quota and 40% out-quota, and want it now; producer groups told the Daily Tribune in early October 2026 that losses had reached up to ₱50 a kilo. Meat processors and importers want the reduced rates kept, and have said so at every review. The DA has now put a number on its side: in September 2026 it proposed 25% and 35% for 2027 and the full 30% and 40% for 2028, phased rather than immediate, and sent it to the Tariff Commission. At the Tariff Commission on 12 October it argued that the 2021 cuts never reached shoppers, since retail stayed high while farmgate fell. The importers' answer, from Jesus Cham of the Meat Importers and Traders Association, was that the increase is "an inflation tax on Filipino families" (Philstar, 13 October 2026). The producer groups, for their part, want the full 30% and 40% now plus temporary limits on import volumes for up to 200 days from October, per their 8 October letter. The DA has simultaneously presided over EO 116, which went the other way. That is not hypocrisy so much as an agency being asked to hold down retail prices and hold up farmgate prices with the same instrument.

Who gets the EO 116 tonnage matters to that argument. Of the 204,210 MT, 120,000 MT is allocated to Food Terminal Inc. and the KADIWA stores, 30,000 MT to processors and 54,210 MT to traders (Adriano, The Manila Times, 16 October 2026). Most of the extra quota, in other words, went to government retail channels meant to hold down shelf prices, not to the private traders raisers usually blame.

What this means for your farm

Stop budgeting for a price recovery driven by a tight herd. The herd being short does not lift your price when the marginal kilo comes from a port. The national inventory has been running under nine million head and prices have not run on it.

Work on the cost side, because that is the side you can still move. A price with a ceiling on it means margin has to come from below, and the biggest line down there is feed. What actually sets the price of your feed sack has the transmission arithmetic and the two ingredients worth switching.

Watch the MAV utilisation and the tariff reviews, not the monthly import headlines. The monthly volume figure is a lagging number that moves on shipping schedules. The quota and the rate are what set your ceiling, and they change by executive order with about a week of warning.

Price your own break-even against the landed import cost, not against the trade's farmgate quote. The industry now puts its cost of production at ₱180 to ₱190 a kilo liveweight, which is about ₱240 to ₱253 a kilo of carcass. If imported dressed pork is landing at ₱120, you are competing on freshness, on the wet-market preference for warm meat, and on nothing else. That preference is real and it is worth something. It is not worth ₱120 a kilo.

And take the local-market advantage seriously, because it is the one thing a container cannot do. Imported pork arrives frozen. BAI's own weekly table prices frozen kasim at ₱240 a kilo and fresh kasim at ₱344 in the week of 14 September 2026, the same ₱104 gap it showed in mid-July, which is a premium the Filipino shopper is voluntarily paying for meat that has not been frozen. That premium is your business, and the retail step is where the money in this chain actually sits. Selling closer to the consumer is the only structural answer anybody has found to a market with a lid on it.

Dili ang imported nga baboy ang kinadak-ang hinungdan sa pagkahulog sa presyo sa unang tunga sa tuig. Ang atong kaugalingong produksiyon ang misaka. Apan ang imported mao gihapon ang nagbutang sa kisame, ug kana ang tinuod nga problema.

The honest limit of all of this

Two things this article cannot do, and it would be dishonest to leave them out.

The import series is annual. Farmgate is monthly, production is quarterly, USDA's imports are yearly. A yearly figure cannot resolve a price move that happened over six months, and every correlation above is therefore a statement about years and not about your last quarter. BAI's year-to-date clearance totals reach the press every month or two, but nobody publishes them as a monthly series with provenance on it. If somebody does, this article should be rewritten against it.

Correlation over sixteen annual observations is fifteen data points on a change basis. That is enough to kill a claim that imports and prices move in opposite directions, because they visibly do not. It is not enough to estimate how much of a ceiling imports impose. Anybody who gives you that number to two decimal places is making it up.

What is left after those two caveats is still the thing worth knowing: the price you were paid in the first half of 2026 fell while your own sector produced six per cent more, and imports grew by about five. Argue about the port all you like. Six per cent more pigs is the bigger half of what happened. What happened after June, when the DA says the price fell another ₱20 or so, is still argued and still unmeasured by PSA.

Where those extra pigs came from is its own article, and the answer will surprise anybody who has been reading about the death of the backyard farm.