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

Ask any hog 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. We publish our copy of it with the retrieval date on every row.

Thousand tonnes carcass weight equivalent. The domestic-share column is ours, and it is the line that matters: almost three 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 hog 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.

Now the two facts that decide the argument.

First: PSA's own production series went up. Quarterly hog 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. 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: nobody has published a 2026 import figure. USDA's estimates are annual and the newest one is 2025. BAI and DA publish monthly meat import volumes, and the trade press quotes them, but there is no full-year 2026 number in existence and will not be until 2027. Every article you have read this year that blamed 2026's price on 2026's imports was reasoning from a figure nobody has.

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 works out to about ₱229 a kilo of carcass at a 75% dressing yield, which is the conversion we walked through separately.

Two to one. 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 ₱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 do nothing, because there is no margin in landing them.

Which is exactly the pattern the correlation shows, and exactly why imports rise in good years and not bad ones.

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 agreement reached in a meeting, with no instrument behind it, and it has never been met by the national average. Outside the Cordillera almost nobody has been paid 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 708, consumption 1,687, all in thousand tonnes carcass weight. 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. Meat processors and importers want the reduced rates kept, and have said so at every review. The DA has recommended restoring the tariff and 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.

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. If your cost of production per kilo of carcass is anywhere near ₱229 and 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 ₱109 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 13 July 2026, which is a ₱104 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 nagpaubos sa presyo karong tuiga. 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, 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. If somebody publishes a monthly Philippine pork import series with provenance on it, this article should be rewritten against it. Nobody has.

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. Argue about the port all you like. Six per cent more pigs is what happened.

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.