NO MATTER the respective market preferences and the varying recipes for preparing corned beef, though, it is traditionally supposed to be nothing more than cured beef. Here’s a bit of trivia: corned beef has nothing to do with corn, “corning” being a method of curing and preserving beef in a mixture of “corns” or grains of salt and nitrite. According to the DA’s Animal Product Development Center (APDC), nitrite is what gives corned beef its bright red color. It is also what prevents the growth of microbes. Training handouts provided by the APDC state that “sodium nitrite is poisonous in high concentrations” and can be carcinogenic; hence, nitrite is supposed to be used only in minute quantities.
Pinoys love beef, especially in cans, but the local animal industry can barely meet the demand.
Where local and imported brands differ, however, is in the origins of the beef that is corned. Imported brands use cattle beef from South America or Australia. Local ones use buffalo meat, the kind imported frozen from India, which is much cheaper than those sourced from buffalo raisers in the country or anywhere else in the world.
Veterinary quarantine certificates (VQCs) issued by the Department of Agriculture for the importation of meat and meat products show that meat processors have been importing boneless buffalo meat or meat trimmings from India in large quantities over the years. Aside from RFM Food Corporation, parent company of Swifts Food Inc, meat processing companies importing frozen buffalo meat from India include the Pacific Meat Company, which produces the highly popular Argentina as well as the 555 corned beef; Purefoods, the food subsidiary of San Miguel Corporation; Foodsphere Inc, makers of CDO corned beef; as well as the smaller meat processors like Pampanga’s Best and Mekeni Foods.
“Talagang we source it from India,” says Almendrala, who laments that the local buffalo or cattle industry simply cannot meet the demands of meat processors for huge volumes and cheaper prices, that are in turn meant to satisfy consumer demands for reasonably priced corned beef.
Data from the Department of Science and Technology and the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics show that the importation of buffalo meat started in 1993 during the term of then President Fidel Ramos who opened the country’s doors to trade liberalization. That year, just a little over 400 metric tons was imported. By 2000, buffalo meat importation had grown to nearly 40,000 metric tons, some 1,000-percent growth in just seven years.
Importers buy Indian buffalo for about P50 per kilo, transportation and importation costs included. Compare that with P80 per kilo of local carabao beef or carabeef, or P190 to P270 per kilo of cattle beef. The Philippines, after all, has just about three million heads of water buffalo, most of which are traditionally used as draft or work animals. India has a surfeit of buffalo — some 98 million heads, which Indians, many of them vegetarian, tap mostly for milk and not for meat.
Dr. Libertado Cruz, executive director of the Philippine Carabao Center (PCC) in Muñoz, Nueva Ecija, was part of the DA team that went to India in 1993 and 1994 to assess the impact Indian buffalo imports would have on the local market. He recalls, “We said that if we do not allow the importation of buffalo meat into the Philippines to meet the increased consumption of meat, particularly beef, there will come a time when we will source it locally. Our breeding base is not sufficient to meet that growing requirement. So we might be breeding carabaos or water buffalos and the market might be taking more than the breeders can produce. And we don’t like that to happen.”
IN 1993, the Agriculture Department allowed buffalo meat importations, but only for the meat processing industry. There were other conditions attached to the importation: it should be free of the dreaded foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), it should be deboned and deglanded, the bones and glands being where the virus germinates, and the meat should be chilled. Chilling removes any trace of virus, if ever, and the curing and processing of the meat further ensures this.
DA rules specify that only meat processors can import Indian buffalo meat. “The importers are the only ones given import permits,” Cruz explains. “If you’re not a processor, there’s no way you can import meat, because the assumption is, if you’re not a processor and you import meat, where are you going to use it? So you are going to sell that in the open market.”
In the Agriculture Department, it is the National Meat Inspection Service and the Bureau of Animal Industry that checks on whether the amount of meat imported by processing companies tallies with their requirement and the capacity of their processing facilities. Ideally, they are supposed to import only enough for their requirements.
But there have been instances when imported Indian buffalo meat hoofed its way into wet markets in Metro Manila. In 2004, the Anti-Smuggling Task Force of the Department of Agriculture conducted raids on wet markets and confiscated, in one wet market alone, a hundred kilos of buffalo meat imported from India. Hog raisers also believe that cheap imported buffalo meat is driving consumers away from pork and may be killing the local hog industry.
All these have made the issue of buffalo meat importation a touchy issue in agriculture sector. It also reveals how the local cattle and carabao industries are ill-equipped to meet the demands of Filipino consumers for beef, even as some livestock growers grouse that India has not been declared free of FMD, and that importing from a country not yet free of FMD will make it difficult for the government to get Luzon off the FMD blacklist.
But this barrage of issues is no match against the single strongest argument for importation that meat processing companies and importers have used so far: consumers are entitled to beef at the lowest prices, no matter that it happens to be buffalo meat imported from India, and no matter that it may eventually get lost in a watery dish called Pinoy corned beef.
