Philippine agriculture lacks the price transparency needed for an efficient market. The data gap hurts the people who can least afford it.
Public price data is monthly, regional, and often delayed. It shows price but not volume. Farmers need local, daily signals from real markets — not aggregated reports they can't act on.
To our knowledge, no bagsakan in the Philippines currently operates a public price board — the most basic tool for market transparency that exists in trading posts worldwide.
Middlemen are incentivized against transparency to protect their margins. Past attempts at price boards have been met with resistance — in some cases, threats of physical violence.
For every ₱10 a consumer spends on produce, the value is split unevenly across the supply chain.
Price transparency creates competition among middlemen — increasing farmer income and lowering consumer prices simultaneously.
Transparency threatens the status quo. Every attempt to introduce price boards in the Philippines has met organized resistance — sometimes violent.
CARD dares not deliver directly to vendor clients at wet markets for their backhaul project. Bypassing middlemen triggers threats of physical violence.
The government-owned BAPTC bagsakan in La Trinidad attempted a price board ten years ago. It didn't survive. Now they're willing to try again with stronger support.
Larger traders in La Trinidad told us "farmers are too illiterate to use AI." But smaller traders approached quietly afterward — saying it looked inevitable and they were willing to work with us.
In the early 2000s, Phillip Ong introduced price boards at Navotas fish port. Smaller traders used them, but larger traders refused to deal with anyone who did. The effort ended after two years.
An ISM 11th grader spent a summer working with CARD farmers in Benguet, testing whether AI and Starlink could help smallholder agriculture.
The AI could diagnose pests. It could interpret soil tests. But it could not answer the one question farmers needed most.
The reason? Reliable price data simply does not exist in the Philippines. That gap became the mission behind the Bagsakan Price Transparency Project.
International evidence shows that even simple price boards at trading posts can transform agricultural markets.
When farmers know market rates, they negotiate from strength — not desperation. International price boards have lifted farmer incomes by up to 20%.
Transparent pricing forces buyers to compete more aggressively, breaking the information monopoly that protects middlemen margins.
Real market data improves how prices are found, reducing the wild swings that hurt both farmers and consumers.
With reliable price data, AI can guide farmers on what to plant and when — evening out supply and reducing boom-bust cycles.
The technology is surprisingly low-tech at the point of capture. The intelligence happens in the cloud.
A simple chalkboard at the bagsakan displays current prices and volumes — visible to every farmer, trader, and vendor in the market.
A photo or video of the board is taken daily, creating a consistent record of market activity that can't be disputed or hidden.
AI reads the photo, extracts price and volume data, and structures it into a searchable, analyzable dataset automatically.
Farmers get actionable market intelligence — what's in demand, what's oversupplied, and where the best prices are — delivered to their phones.
The pilot targets strategic markets — one in the highlands, one in Metro Manila — to prove the concept and create data reciprocity between supply and demand centers.
The Benguet Agri-Pinoy Trading Center is a DA-supported facility in the vegetable capital of the Philippines. They've agreed to participate and tried a price board a decade ago — they're ready to try again with better tools.
A Metro Manila counterpart creates data reciprocity with BAPTC — connecting highland supply signals with urban demand data. The combination unlocks the full value of the transparency network.
Farm prices rise — farmers negotiate from real data, not guesswork. Information asymmetry is the root cause of exploitation.
Consumer prices drop — competition among middlemen squeezes out the rent-seeking that currently inflates retail prices.
Smarter planting — AI uses historical and real-time price data to advise farmers on optimal crop selection and timing.
Scalable model — once proven, the gov't can encourage other LGUs to adopt the same framework across the country.
This project needs people who can build AI systems and hold their own at a bagsakan at 3 AM. This team does both.
Co-founder of Briefcase AI. MS from Brown University. Designs the AI architecture and data systems that turn blackboard photos into market intelligence.
Founded poultry, logistics, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu businesses. BA from Royal Naval Academy, UK. Former MMA champion. Brings supply chain experience and, well, grit.
Competitive breakdancer and jiu-jitsu instructor from Bicutan. The relationships and ground-level trust that make market work actually happen.
A team comprised of 3 members from Project Bagsakan, 2 members from the Makati Business Club, and Ray Alimurung visited the Balintawak Wet Market to get a firsthand look at running the Project Bagsakan price board pilot.
A price board already existed. The market management team stated that the boards were updated twice a day — once at 12:00 noon and again at 4:00 AM — with the prices of vegetables and other produce as agreed upon by a self-assembled collective of sellers.
However, upon interviewing the market stall salespeople, we found that they were unaware of such price boards, and that each stall functioned individually, setting their own prices for their goods.
There is a mismatch in information here — price boards exist on paper, but not in practice. The project hopes to uncover and solve for exactly this kind of gap between institutional intent and on-the-ground reality.
A recent field visit to the La Trinidad trading post in Benguet — the primary bagsakan for upland vegetables supplying much of the Philippines — surfaced a structural issue worth the attention of any organization considering investment in agricultural supply chain reform. Vegetables move through five distinct intermediaries between farm and consumer: farmer, viajero (trader), wholesaler, retailer, and buyer. At every handoff, costs are added and prices are renegotiated, yet none of this information is documented or passed forward. The consumer sees only the final figure on a stall sign, with no visibility into how it was built.
This is not a case of dishonest pricing; it is a case of absent infrastructure for transparency, and the effects of this fall hardest on the small farmers least equipped with the information necessary to hedge against the volatility of the current oil crisis.
Interviews with five traders at La Trinidad reinforced a consistent pattern. A mid-sized truckload of potatoes carries a wholesale cost of ₱15,000 to ₱20,000, but that figure fluctuates daily based on fuel, farm location, harvest quality, and same-day oversupply conditions. The present oil crisis has considerable effect on the market. One trader reported reducing her operations from five pre-dawn trips to one, signaling compressed margins across the sector.
Another was purchasing at La Trinidad to transport south to Batangas — evidence that Cordillera produce feeds lowland markets through routes entirely invisible to end consumers. Perhaps most telling: traders routinely discount prices near closing to clear perishable stock, meaning morning shoppers systematically overpay for identical goods. None of the five traders could quote a fixed price, and none disputed that the information gap between their operations and the buying public is both real and structural.
The vegetables themselves already make a complex, well-coordinated journey from mountain to market. The opportunity — and the case for sponsorship — is to ensure the pricing information travels alongside them, giving farmers, their small businesses, and the traders themselves a more equitable foundation to operate on.
All photos taken by Apa Ongpin
If you've ever wondered where your morning kangkong spent the night before it hit your palengke, the answer is probably Divisoria. On April 15, the Project Bagsakan team alongside MBC rolled into the Divisoria Wholesale Market between 6 and 7 PM to see how one of Metro Manila's biggest bagsakans actually runs. We found that it runs on organized chaotic energy and a 12-hour trading window from 5 PM to 5 AM, when produce from Benguet, Nueva Ecija, Nueva Vizcaya, and even General Santos gets unloaded, haggled over, and sold off before sunrise. By 5 AM, most of the goods are gone. By breakfast, you're eating them.
For a market moving that much volume that fast, there is shockingly little written down. Pricing is fully decentralized — no posted rates, no central authority, no app pinging you the going rate of sitaw. Prices are negotiated stall by stall, whispered through the bulungan, and shaped by suki relationships built over years. A farmer in Benguet sells at ₱100/kg, the bagsakan moves it at ₱130, and your neighborhood tindera lists it at ₱160. Each markup looks reasonable in isolation; stacked together, they're the reason farmers and suki both feel like they're losing. And because nobody has a reliable reference price, nobody can actually tell if a deal is fair — this is why price transparency matters. This is what Project Bagsakan is all about.
Not to mention, the logistics situation isn't doing anyone favors either. There's no cold storage (honestly, limited storage space overall) and trucks that haul produce three to four days old from Mindanao without temperature control — the field heat still intact. Vendors literally splash water on leafy greens to keep them looking alive — a practice that we understand but mourn at the same time. Around 2 AM, perishables get fire-sale prices because spoilage is coming for everyone. The cumulative cost of all this informality is wastage, narrower margins, and prices that get harder to justify the further you trace them back to the farm. Again, this is why price transparency matters. This is why our project matters.
Our solution — the Price Transparency Board — will solve this. Cloverleaf already has a Bantay Presyo board, and even there, awareness and use among traders is low — proof that just putting up a board isn't enough. The fix has to be a system: consistent updates, accessible formats, and stakeholders who actually trust and use it.
Project Bagsakan and MBC are now folding insights from Divisoria, Cloverleaf, BSU, and the Cabanatuan LGU into a refined proposal for BAPTC and Cabanatuan, with a follow-up meeting lined up with DA-AMAS to learn from how Bantay Presyo operates today. The goal isn't to formalize Divisoria's organized chaos out of existence — but to make sure the people growing the food aren't the ones absorbing all the risk, because they shouldn't. We can all agree on that.
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BAPTC has already said yes. LGU support is pending. One more market — ideally Balintawak or Divisoria — and the pilot is live. AI handles the rest in the cloud. Once proven, the national government can help scale this across the Philippines.