Among the headlines barely noticed in the last week were the sharp increases in regional inflation numbers. In Mindanao’s two largest economies, the 1.14 trillion peso-strong Davao Region’s monthly inflation rate hit 8.9 percent in April 2026, up from the already high 5.9 percent in March of this year, a staggering jump from the .5 percent inflation of March 2025. The northern Mindanao economy’s 1.095 trillion peso economy clocked and 8.2 percent April 2026 inflation rate, up from 4.6 percent in March and far from the .1 percent rate in April 2025.

When combined, the Northern Mindanao and Davao Regional economies are the economic heart of Mindanao’s 25 million residents. Inflation can threaten their growth and jeopardize development prospects for these and nearby regions. We need to examine what these mean and what can be done to help us cope with their effects.

The obvious manifestation and driver of inflation is higher food and transport prices due to higher fuel costs stemming from global disruptions. While it may be easy to clinically examine this as just a play of economic numbers, the effects on the spending capabilities and living costs of people and families are indeed profound. The more families spend on such things, the less will be available for other priorities, particularly strategic expenses like education, health, and shelter.

Thus, I believe the first area of intervention is ensuring food sufficiency for the local population. Lower food costs can keep other costs low, limiting suffering and making more funds available. Likewise, challenges in the near future, such as a major El Niño event, can hurt our food systems, weakening future production and threatening to keep inflation high.

Toward this, creating regional-level food sufficiency task forces can take stock of local capabilities and can determine ways forward to lower food production and consumption costs.

Formed within each Regional Development Council (RDC), this task force can identify challenges and opportunities in the local food production sector, to fund ways to build a resilient food system that assures consumers of sufficient, affordable food, and ample incomes for producers.

The task force can prepare data such as monthly Food inventories accounting for seasonality and other factors, and based on the standard nutritional requirements of all regional residents. This tells us how much food is locally produced and whether this supply is enough to supply healthful levels of food for everyone. This can also identify supply constraints and identify opportunities for investment to improve production and opportunities in food production.

The task force can recommend measures such as targeted transport subsidies to bring produce from farms to markets, and encourage agroprocessing industries that can buy large volumes of produce, such as the manufacture of frozen vegetables, which we often import from abroad.

These and other suggested approaches can and must be tackled by all stakeholders within the region, including farm groups and consumers, at the level of this task force. I believe that all regions have the capacity to produce reasonable amounts of food for their respective populations. What cannot be produced in high volumes and at low cost can be sourced from nearby regions, especially for provinces adjacent to neighboring regions. As I wrote in a previous column, having proximate production can keep costs low.

The work of this task force can enable timely action to be taken towards affordable, locally produced food while improving farm incomes into the future. This makes our local food systems, and in turn, our economies and communities more resilient to face current and future challenges.