Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) Secretary Ramon Lopez has assured that the country has an adequate supply of food even with the extension of the enhanced community quarantine until April 30.
In a Laging Handa public briefing recently, Lopez said food manufacturers have a 45-day inventory and raw materials for their products are still available.
“Food manufacturers ramp up their production capacity from 80% to 90%.”
The trade chief added that food manufacturers have also ramped up their production capacity from 80 percent to 90 percent after the DTI issued a new policy that allowed factories of essential goods to operate using more than 50 percent of its workforce.
The trade head recalled that the DTI earlier ordered companies to operate only using up to 50 percent of their workforce. This created a temporary shortage of supplies due to a limited workforce amid the Luzon-wide quarantine that started on March 17.
The logistics challenges also slowed down the distribution of supplies to the market with the strict measures at checkpoints during the first few weeks of the enhanced community quarantine, Lopez added.
Lopez said the improvement in cargo movement and the addition of production workers have eased the temporary shortage.
“We can now catch up with the temporary shortage.”
“So, for the supply of food, we don’t have a problem,” he said in Filipino. “We can now catch up with the temporary shortage.”
Lopez added that there is also no increase in suggested retail prices (SRPs) of products, including alcohol, even if the demand has surged due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
He said an alcohol manufacturer told DTI that the demand for the product in the first two months of 2020 is equivalent to the demand for the whole year of 2019.
But Lopez added that these manufacturers are giving a big allocation of their output for the domestic market.