Endangered

Before the Holy Week break, among the topics in our newsroom chats was salt. Top-quality, non-iodized sea salt of just the right size – not too fine, not too large like some varieties of Himalayan pink.

It’s not pricey French fleur de sel, the caviar of salt, but sea salt from Pangasinan, my paternal grandmother’s home province. 

I found out that I wasn’t the only one who preferred non-iodized rock salt from the wet market, sold uncovered in a bilao or bamboo winnowing basket, scooped out of a large mound and weighed in front of you.   

And I found out that I wasn’t the only one who preferred salt from Pangasinan, whose salt beds face the West Philippine Sea. At least Beijing is not laying claim (yet) to the salt beds.

 Salt was one of the stuff I set out to buy when I visited Pangasinan again, during the Holy Week break. Dagupan is one of my favorite travel destinations during Lent, of course for the bangus or milkfish, the best in the country, and the other fish that’s special to the province, malaga.

My annual visit to the province is also a chance for me to visit a paternal aunt, a retired psychologist. Her home is just across the main highway from Patring’s Tupig, the best I’ve ever tasted. Business must be good for Patring’s. Even on Good Friday, I could see many folks within the compound scraping the coconuts, so there must have been more inside the house doing the actual cooking of the flattened rice cake.  

Preparing tupig is a labor of love. I enjoy cooking, but this is one product I leave to the expert tupig makers, and Patring’s never disappoints.

*      *      *

What was disappointing was my failure to find sea salt in the Dagupan market. Maybe I didn’t look in the right place. But I got my large bangus and malaga, plus live suahe, and of course the other famous Pangasinan product, mangoes.

Red onions were retailed at P60 a kilo. Yes, the vendor told me, they were of the same local variety sold for P700 a kilo at the end of 2022.

 Another disappointment: no local garlic. The vendors were all selling large Taiwanese garlic (P120 to P140 a kilo) because, they told me, the local variety was too small and expensive.

In Manila, Ilocos garlic is retailed for a whopping P450 to P500 a kilo, so I was hoping to get the local bulbs, which are of superior quality than the Taiwanese, at a lower price in Pangasinan.

It’s a shame that we’re losing our local garlic to imports. We import 93 percent of our national salt needs; the percentage must now be the same for garlic.  

 From Dagupan on the way back to Manila, I looked for roadside stalls where Ilocos garlic used to be sold. I finally found a grouping of stalls along the highway, I think it was in Urdaneta, where Ilocos garlic in the traditional bundles and braids were still displayed alongside dried red shallots, Lingayen fish sauce and bagoong isda.

 The garlic was priced at P330 to P350 a kilo depending on the size. I got the largest ones at a discounted P320 because I bought a lot, plus a large bunch of dried shallots and top-quality walis tambo, another popular product of Northern Luzon. And several kilos of rock salt, at P100 for three kilos.

President Marcos has said he found it unacceptable that the country is importing galunggong or round scad, the so-called poor man’s fish (not anymore). Being an Ilocano, he should find it even more unacceptable that we are almost entirely dependent on imports for our salt needs, and Ilocos garlic production is a dying enterprise.

*      *      *

Before leaving the roadside stalls, I looked wistfully at the array of native garlic and shallots – familiar sights in my youth, but now looking like endangered species – wondering how long they would still be around.

 Will the salt beds and garlic plantations of Pangasinan soon be converted into residential subdivisions or shopping malls?

The government should be energetically assisting local farmers, fishers and salt producers in making their livelihoods viable and profitable. Liberating them from poverty must be a priority in our still largely agricultural country. Their livelihoods are also tourist draws.

Instead government officials take the easy way out, by simply importing many of the food commodities the country needs. Recently when I bought my regular supply of rice from the wholesaler, fragrant long-grain rice from Myanmar was being retailed at P51 per kilo, much lower than local varieties of similar quality.

Importation is meant to stabilize supply and prices of various agricultural commodities especially outside the harvest season. But importation can be habit forming, and must be balanced carefully with protection of the livelihoods of domestic agricultural producers, especially the marginalized ones.

What we’re seeing instead is all-year-round importation, with little accompanying support for boosting local agricultural output. This is discouraging domestic production of a wide variety of food commodities, from rice to onions, garlic and salt.

We urgently need to do something more than hang our heads in shame.