CEBU has hit the top spot with the highest inflation rate in the country. While inflation has slowed a little in the highly urbanized cities of Cebu, Lapu-Lapu and Mandaue, it continued to rise in the province. Inflation went from 12.9 percent in April to 13.6 percent in May. That’s double the 6.8 percent national rate.
For Cebu’s bottom 30 percent income households, that meant an 18.1 percent inflation rate in May, up from 16.1 percent in April. 18.1 percent! How do people cope? The inflation is primarily driven by climbing prices of food. For the bottom 30 percent, food inflation accounts for almost two-thirds of the total inflation.
In 2021, during the Covid pandemic, poverty incidence among Cebu’s population reached 36.5 percent. That was the 10th highest among the country’s provinces. And while the poverty rate had dropped to 21.9 percent by 2023, there is cause for alarm. The annual per capita poverty threshold, based on the local cost of living, jumped about 30 percent from 2018 to 2021 in Cebu province and its HUCs. The change from 2021 to 2023 is relatively modest. What will be the longer-term impact on the cost of living, and thus poverty, of the prolonged, elevated inflation rate that we are experiencing now?
Cebu, incidentally, is also No. 1 as far as the number of stunted preschool children is concerned. The province had 20,664 cases in 2023, according to the National Nutrition Council Central Visayas (The Freeman, May 31, 2026). While Cebu doesn’t have the highest prevalence of stunted children, it is a physical manifestation of the poverty that exists in Cebu.
Responding to the news about the high inflation rate, Cebu provincial administrator — a former tourism secretary — Ace Durano acknowledged that Cebu has a problem. “We don’t produce enough for our needs here, whether vegetables, meats, chicken, pork, goods,” Durano told reporters (Manila Times, June 19). To address this situation, the province is working on strengthening local food production and bringing down the costs of transportation, Durano said.
While, indeed, Cebu has a large population — 5.2 million including the three highly urbanized cities — and achieving food self-sufficiency is thus unrealistic, the agriculture and fisheries sectors, with the right support, could be a lot more productive. For as long as I can remember, the mantra has been that Cebu is not agricultural. This somehow has served as an excuse for not seriously addressing issues afflicting agriculture and fisheries. Farmers have had to fight landowners resisting agrarian reform every step of the way. Prime agricultural land has been converted to give way to subdivisions and other so-called development. Fisheries production has been getting smaller in the past 20 years. The modest increases noted in 2024 and 2025 have not even returned fisheries production to 2022 levels. The year 2023 was the worst on record (source: Karagatan Patrol).
Cebu’s strategic location and its historical position as a trading center have helped the province become a popular tourist destination and convention venue, and home to call centers and export-oriented manufacturing companies. Bringing in fresh fruits, vegetables, fish and more from neighboring islands — especially from Mindanao — has been easy and relatively cheap. But that changed overnight with the US-Israel attack on Iran. The impact on the cost of transportation was immediate.
As pointed out by the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas in the book “Current Account Dynamics and the Philippine Economy” (BSP, 2025), Philippine agriculture is seriously inefficient. Taking a cue from this, Cebu has to think out of the box in order to achieve some measure of food security. The traditional programs and policies guiding support for agricultural and fisheries production are obviously inadequate in uplifting the productivity — and sustainability — of these basic sectors, more so with the pressing need to adapt to climate change. This goes for Cebu City as well. The city has about 13,000 registered farmers, most of them vegetable farmers in the city’s hilly lands. Despite their importance to the city’s food security, they are not getting the support they need. Two years ago, at the height of the drought, the city government spent P79 million on agricultural supplies of questionable relevance. The drought had been taking its toll for months. Worse, state auditors found that the supplies had been distributed with great delay, with much not distributed at all. Despite the lessons learned, drought and its impact on crops and farmers are again being addressed reactively.
The 36.5 percent poverty incidence in Cebu province during the pandemic was a warning. The current crisis is the final call. Self-sufficiency is not realistic, but too much dependence on the outside world for the supply of food, jobs and income-earning opportunities makes Cebu very vulnerable. Interventions that address productivity, sustainability and cost of food production were needed yesterday. The goal should be to secure access to sufficient, nutritious and affordable food for all, today and tomorrow, so that no Cebuano child will go hungry or become malnourished.
