Every administration promises them. Every province requests them. Every budget cycle hands out billions for them. Farm-to-market roads have become the default answer to almost every agricultural transport problem in the Philippines.
And yet, farmers in Benguet still watch their cabbages rot in the field.
Maybe we are solving the wrong problem.
In mountainous terrain, roads are not always the most efficient answer. They are expensive to build, costly to maintain, and fragile against landslides, erosion, and typhoon damage. Even where roads exist, fuel prices, vehicle wear, and steep grades quietly bleed the farmer dry. Produce stays in the field. Costs climb. Farmers earn less. Consumers pay more. The cycle repeats every harvest.
The problem is not theoretical. By late March and April 2026, farmers in Atok and other upland Benguet towns were walking away from their own fields. The numbers told them to. Reuters spoke to 57-year-old farmer Romeo Wagayan on March 31. “If we harvest it, our losses only increase because of labor, transportation and packing costs,” he said. “We don’t earn anything from it.” A kilo of cabbage cost him ₱18 to ₱20 to grow. Farmgate prices had collapsed to ₱3, drifting between ₱5 and ₱8. By the time Rappler reached the Benguet Agri-Pinoy Trading Center on April 17, a five-ton truckload of cabbage was fetching ₱15,000 to ₱20,000 — against ₱60,000 to ₱70,000 in production cost. A few days earlier, Bombo Radyo Baguio reported 15 tons of Chinese cabbage left to rot in a single barangay, with trading-post prices at ₱4 to ₱9 per kilo. The story repeated in 2018, in 2022, in 2024, and now again in 2026 — and the explanation has never really been agriculture. It has been mobility.
When food rots not because the farm failed but because the road failed, this stops being an agriculture problem. It is an infrastructure problem.
The government’s response confirmed the diagnosis. President Marcos flew to Benguet on April 17. He came back with a temporary ₱10-per-liter fuel subsidy for cargo trucks, toll waivers along the route to Metro Manila, and a one-time order to buy more than 20 tons of vegetables from the trading post for distribution to orphanages and jails. Truckers, he said, were paying up to ₱3,000 a trip in tolls alone. None of this is a fix. It is the same emergency patch the country reaches for every time fuel climbs.
Roads are not the only way to move a sack of cabbage down a mountain.
Other countries figured this out a long time ago. Japan built the first agricultural monorack — a single-rail transporter that climbs steep slopes — in 1966. South Korean and Japanese farms have run these systems on hillsides too steep for any truck ever since. The Swiss-Austrian manufacturer Doppelmayr Garaventa says it has installed more than 650 agricultural monorack lines around the world. Nepal has been using gravity ropeways — simple cables where the weight of descending crops pulls the empty containers back up — for decades. China now runs cable logistics as standard rural infrastructure on its mountain farms.
This is not foreign technology in spirit. A Reuters photograph from Atok on March 31 captured it plainly — a farmer lowering a basket of cabbages on a hand-rigged pulley, down a hillside, into the bed of a waiting truck. The principle is already in Filipino hands. Only the scale is missing.
The Philippines does not need to copy other countries’ systems. It needs to adapt them.
The principle is straightforward. Instead of forcing trucks to climb the same broken road every harvest, build systems that bring produce down to where the trucks already are. Cable lines. Pulley systems. Conveyors. Compact rail. Gravity-assisted rollers. Modular electric platforms. The technology is not exotic. Much of it is older than the highways we keep rebuilding.
In communities where one typhoon undoes a year of road repair, a fixed cable line may actually be cheaper over time. It takes less land. It burns no fuel. It does not wash out in the next storm. It moves crops faster, which means less spoilage and less wasted labor.
But this cannot be another imported showcase project.
If every cable, motor, and replacement part has to come from abroad, the system will collapse the moment the foreign supplier walks away. We have seen this before in too many other sectors. The way out is to build this as a local industry from day one — Filipino engineers, Filipino fabricators, state universities, local manufacturers, transport experts. Small cable systems and modular rail platforms are within Philippine engineering capability. They are not beyond us.
Build it here, and the country gets more than mobility. It gets a domestic industry. It gets jobs. It gets the technical depth to maintain, repair, and improve these systems without waiting for someone in Europe or East Asia to answer the phone.
This is not an argument against farm-to-market roads. Roads will always connect towns to trading centers. The argument is against treating roads as the only tool in the box.
A hybrid system makes more sense. Roads link municipalities and provincial hubs. Cable, conveyor, and rail systems handle the difficult last kilometer — the part where the road runs out and the farmer’s back takes over.
The Philippines has spent decades debating agricultural transport using the same vocabulary. Bigger roads. More roads. Better roads. The vocabulary itself has become the limit.
Sometimes the smarter route is not another road carved into a mountain.
Sometimes it is to move above the road entirely.
Doc Paul holds doctoral degrees in fiscal management and in peace and security, a master’s degree in national security, and an engineering degree in electronics and communications. He writes on Philippine national security, defense, fiscal policy, and governance at pychua.com.
