Not oob, not oo-bey, but “u-beh”. A name tied to every Filipino’s early memories of crowded fiestas or lively Christmas Eve with a long table reserved just for desserts. Aside from being a symbol of royalty, purple at the occasion teases a week-long treat of sticky refrigerated sweets at home.
“Can you imagine a Philippine Christmas without ube? It feels like there’s something missing. And it feels like there’s something wrong,” Jam Melchor, Filipino chef and founder of advocacy group the Philippine Culinary Heritage Movement, told in an interview with the New York Times.
However, tied to good memories is the heavy price that comes alongside ube as Filipinos face sharing their childhood delicacy with the rest of the world amid a shortage.
Ube is a sweet rising star native to the Philippines, and now, a well-loved delicacy with a global market value worth $455 million in 2024.
The yam, a root crop or tuber mostly grown in provinces Benguet, Cagayan, and Bohol, is turning many heads with its unusual purple color. Its sweet, nutty vegetable has found its way to many recipes such as ube jam, ice cream, and–more recently–frappucinos and lattes.
In a single year, Mintel’s Global New Products Database recorded a total of 359 product launches starring ube.
“ For a long time, other countries didn't even know what ube was and they would even confuse it for the purple varieties of sweet potato. But they’re completely different,” High-Value Crops Development Program Undersecretary Cheryl Natividad-Caballero said in the same interview.
With more eyes on the Philippines one and only ube, the Department of Agriculture (DA) has reported the demand for purple yam has skyrocketed from 14,000 tons in 2019 to 200,000 tons in 2024.
Yet, behind these big numbers that could have meant a royalty for the ube industry, farmers back in Benguet are now struggling to meet the demand while putting food on the table.
Ube farmer Teresita Emilio carries a rusted metal pipe for digging in one hand and the ube-farming craft of her family on the other. As a livelihood passed on for generations, Emilio’s hands knew Benguet’s coarse soil long before ube became a global sensation.
Farming the root crop for more than five decades, Emilio has usually only gone as far as to seeing ube’s dusty, irregularly-shaped skin. The rich purple preserved inside was always saved for the customers down the mountain to savor, while the vegetable’s farmers stayed uphill with a few pennies as an income.
To barely survive on P80 per kilo of ube, Emilio said farmers like her in Benguet have been pushed to sell every single piece of purple yam they can pull and tug out of their small plantations.
With nothing left to replant, ube farmers find themselves caught in a cycle of scarcity fueled by a government that has yet to provide the sector with seedlings and other subsidies.
“I had so much ube then. I would even throw them away. Now, they’re close to being gone,” Emilio told The New York Times.
A harsher reality follows ube farmers as the Department of Agriculture cuts down on the industry’s budget by 10%, down to only P10 million for the rest of the year. The undersupported industry of ube is in a losing competition for funds against other crops such as rice, corn, and vegetables which are considered pivotal ingredients to solving malnutrition in the country.
As a result, “planting materials” like pieces of ube for farmers to bury to grow new ones are becoming much more difficult for farmers to get their hands on.
The race to meet the global ube craze should have kept the Philippines, the crop’s cultural home, in the top spot. However, the sector and its farmers have easily been overturned by other nations’ technology.
Vietnam now accounts for 21% of global purple yam exports, more than double of the Philippines’ 9% share, through cloning their crops in propagation centers and strong cooperatives.
This doesn’t mean the end for Filipino ube farmers. Several efforts have been made to push the sector closer to its competitors.
One step lawmakers are making is the “Ube Bill”, authored by Camarines Sur representatives Luigi Villafuerte and Miguel Luis Villafuerte, which seeks to support farmers particularly in the Bicol region through formalizing the value chain from farm to export. The bill also introduces the “ Ube Industry Development Fund”, ensuring that farmers are assisted financially in accessing local farming technologies like cold-storage facilities and other processes in exporting products.
In the hopes of preserving the crop’s strong cultural tie to the Philippines, farmers can meet the current demand for ube through innovations that stray away from the old-school, low-yielding methods of farming the root crop.
Unlike neighboring countries like Vietnam which have employed advanced technology in their sector, Filipino researchers from the University of the Philippines-Los Baños (UPLB) College of Agriculture and Food Science have recognized that lab-grown ube is an ambition that could leave out Filipino farmers in the conversation.
Rather than rushing farmers to wear lab coats and learn complex technologies, researchers suggested simpler scientific-based processes in harvesting ube. These include sprout division, a process wherein the crop is grown for two weeks before cutting its sprouts for replanting.
“We don’t want to export raw materials, only processed ube like powder and extracts because we want to maintain the farming here,” Christopher Gomez, distributor of ube working alongside farmers, told German broadcast news organization Deutsche Welle (DW).
The Philippines is not running low on resources alone, and the impending shortage for purple yam will only worsen without giving farmers all the help they need to satisfy the world’s cravings for the ube.
As the nation’s yam industry looks to feed the world with farmers they cannot afford to support, the choice on who gets to enjoy the yummy yam is between those who have known ube their whole life and those who pronounce the culturally important delicacy as oob.
