Food

Francis Tiu Laurel, 59, is the new secretary of Agriculture, vice, President Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos Jr., the Oxford-educated son and namesake of the president who achieved a rice surplus and launched the Green Revolution in the Philippines in the 1970s.

Having failed to bring down rice retail price to P20 per kilo and stop a runaway food-shortage-driven inflation, Marcos Jr. has come down to earth, given up, and given the job to the guy who knows best, Francis Tiu (Laurel is an adopted name).

Francis brings to his job 30 years of experience hunting for and harvesting food, from the deep ocean, that is, bring it up from the sea to the seafood restaurant, or from sea to the canning factory.

Few food tycoons have the wealth and depth of his experience – invest hard earned money, risk life and limb braving the waves and the winds, and bring bountiful catch from the deep up to the safety of land and consumer hands. Fishing is one of the most profitable enterprises; depending on how you market your catch, you can multiply your cash 10 to 20 times your capital. Provided you are as big as Francis’ Frabelle Fishing Corp. whose motto is, “nobody does it better”, fish from ocean to table.

Frabelle is a conglomerate – “deep-sea fishing, aquaculture, canning, food manufacturing and processing, food importation and trading, cold storage, shipyard operations, wharf development, real estate development, and power generation;” “over 100 vessels, and a growing workforce of 5,000; the go-to source for fresh, frozen, and processed seafood, with a market that extends to Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, and the United States.” In 2019, the latest year for which data is available, Frabelle reported total revenues of P3.5 billion.

Unfortunately, 99.9 percent of fishermen are unlike Frabelle. Filipino fishermen are the poorest of the poor. In 2021, because of Chinese presence in Panatag Shoal, the income of a fisherman per trip went down 70 percent to P300 – probably not enough for Francis’s coffee money. Fishing is the slowest growing sector of Philippine agriculture. In 2022, livestock grew 2.5 percent, poultry 1.8 percent, while crops declined 1.0 percent, and