[Vantage Point] How the Philippines lost its salt - Rappler

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I remember a very different Manila Bay.

It was sometime between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s. The exact dates have blurred with time, but the coastal landscape remains vivid through the window of our family car, with my father’s hands steady at the wheel. Back then, long before massive reclamation projects pushed the shoreline far into the ocean, as far as my young eyes could see, lay row upon row of shallow salt beds, tended from dawn to dusk under the punishing tropical sun by weathered, barefoot laborers.

Las Piñas was then a thriving capital of salt-making, carpeted with hundreds of hectares of irasan. Its prized primera salt, renowned across Luzon for being as pure and white as winter frost, graced household pantries and public markets across greater Manila.

Salt feels ordinary now. Yet, for centuries, it was the very bedrock of human survival and civilization’s first currency. Before cold storage and modern refrigeration, it was what kept empires fed through lean seasons and explorers during voyages.

Governments waged conflicts and levied heavy taxes over its trade, and merchants carved historic commerce routes along its trail. Even today, our language preserves its timeless nobility whenever we honor the fundamentally decent and hardworking among us as the “salt of the earth.”

Which makes what eventually happened to the Philippine salt industry all the more bewildering and tragic.

In 1970, official records mentioned during Senate deliberations revealed that the country produced roughly 89% of its domestic salt, relying on foreign suppliers for a mere 11%. Even by the early 1990s, local beds still supplied nearly 85% of our national needs.

Today, the arithmetic has flipped completely on its head. Government estimates now place our dependence on imported salt as high as 93%. In 2024 alone, the Philippines imported nearly 660,000 metric tons valued at over $41 million — with Australia and China cornering roughly 98% of that vast volume.

How does an archipelago endowed with more than 36,000 kilometers of pristine coastline end up purchasing from abroad seawater’s most elemental gift?

The decline was not born of a single misstep. The relentless march of urbanization, coastal highways, and encroaching reclamation steadily swallowed the heritage beds of Las Piñas and neighboring provinces.

Shifting, erratic weather patterns brought unexpected rains that disrupted the delicate, sun-dependent rhythm of solar evaporation. 

Meanwhile, local technology remained frozen in time, leaving our domestic producers defenseless against flood tides of heavily subsidized, cheap industrial salt from abroad.

Then, well-intentioned public policy delivered the quiet, crushing blow.

In late 1995, then-president Fidel V. Ramos signed Republic Act 8172, the Act for Salt Iodization Nationwide, widely known as the ASIN Law. Its core public-health premise was undeniably noble.

Iodine deficiency had long stunted childhood development and caused widespread goiter across rural areas, and by clinical measures, universal fortification worked. 

Between 1998 and 2003, median urinary iodine levels among Filipino schoolchildren surged, drastically reducing severe deficiencies nationwide.

The benefits, however, were never truly universal, as pregnant and lactating mothers continued to suffer deficiencies that required targeted interventions anyway. 

The fundamental flaw was never the ambition of public health; it was the administrative myopia of the mandate.

Instead of treating iodization as an industrial, downstream process, the state conscripted traditional, artisanal salt makers into an industrial food-fortification regime they could neither understand nor afford.

Under threat of stiff legal penalties, the law and its implementing rules demanded that every producer, local processor, and even modest wet-market vendors handle and distribute only iodized products.

Imagine what that impossible demand meant to the salt farmer of my childhood memories. His timeless trade was an organic alchemy of sun, wind, tide, and generational patience.

Overnight, the state expected him to become a sophisticated chemical processor — requiring mechanical mixing equipment, costly potassium iodate, laboratory testing, specialized packaging, and an endless paper trail of regulatory compliance. 

Unable to bear the financial burden, generations of coastal families had no choice but to abandon their salt pans.

Vantage Point believes that there was always a wiser, more humane path. 

The government could have easily established centralized, cooperative refining facilities to fortify food-grade salt destined for mass consumption, while leaving coastal harvesters free to produce raw sea, agricultural, and artisanal salt. Instead, a struggling, sun-baked trade was made to shoulder an impossible compliance cost.

The ultimate irony arrived nearly three decades later.

With the passage of the Philippine Salt Industry Development Act of 2024 (or Republic Act 11985), Congress finally conceded the truth. 

The new measure seeks to revitalize an endangered sector by explicitly exempting artisanal and non-food salt from mandatory iodization, declaring at long last that the burden of chemical fortification should never rest on primary farmers.

Thirty years too late, the state finally grasped the obvious difference between harvesting sea salt and chemically altering it.

Whenever I gaze at the gray, reclaimed shoreline of modern Manila Bay, I think back to the boy watching from the back seat of his father’s car. 

Economic growth and urban sprawl may have made the loss of those dazzling white beds somewhat inevitable, but an entire domestic heritage did not have to die with them.

We could have protected our children’s health without asking our coastal salt farmers to pay with their very existence.

I welcome your views on these and other issues where decisions made in power shape the country’s economic future. – Rappler.com