In Sunnyside, Queens, people line up outside a bakery before it opens to buy a brioche doughnut whose glaze shines a startling purple. In Paris, people sip purple-colored lattes with a mellow, nutty scent. In Melbourne, Australia, a purple tinge gives hot cross buns a gentle sweetness.
The common ingredient in these items is ube, or the Philippine purple yam, and the world’s new hunger for it is starting to strain the people who farm it. The country grows more than 14,000 tons of it a year and is considered to be the world’s top producer.
Up a hill and among the trees in Benguet, a mountainous province in the Philippines, Teresita Emilio scanned the ground and found a stump almost invisible to the naked eye. She slowly dug around it with a metal rod before using her gloved hands.
“I need to be careful. I might injure it,” said Ms. Emilio, 62, reaching into the narrow hole. She tugged.
Snap. Cradled in her arms, she pulled out what looked like a pudgy tree branch the size of a newborn. At the base of its head, where the root connected to the stem, radiated the color purple. Raw ube.
“It’s not a lot,” Ms. Emilio said.
As ube has gained ground globally, Filipino farmers like Ms. Emilio are barely keeping up. At home, the tuber — which is native to the country and grown mostly on small, seasonal plots — has long been turned into jams, ice creams and cakes. Now its photogenic hue and subtle flavor have helped fuel a viral craze — putting pressure on the Philippines to supply more, even as climate change ravages harvests and producers in China and Vietnam ramp up their own purple yams.
“It’s the new matcha,” said Cheryl Natividad-Caballero, an under secretary of the agriculture department in charge of the country’s high-value crops, which includes ube. “Given the increasing requirement from the increasing demand, we have to now improve the system.”
The main U.N. food and agriculture databases do not break out ube exports from other yams, but officials and scientists say it’s safe to assume the Philippines is the world’s leading producer. The country, which has a long tradition in using ube for sweets, is virtually alone in growing the fragrant variety used for desserts.
“We are still the top producer,” said Natividad-Caballero. “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.”
Annual ube production has slipped from more than 15,000 tons in 2021 to about 14,000 tons in the past two years, with most of that for local consumption, according to government data. However, exports have quadrupled in recent years to more than 200 tons annually, with more than half of that bound for the United States. The Philippines has even been forced to import some ube from Vietnam to meet local demand.
“The gross supply barely meets the demand,” Ms. Natividad-Caballero said.
All of this fuss over ube is new to Ms. Emilio. She learned to farm it as a girl in the Benguet hills, trailing her mother through rows of pineapples, turmeric and pandan. The tubers she dug up were for neighbors and buyers who made the trek up the mountain. It was nothing like the world’s appetite she feeds now.
“I had so much ube then,” Ms. Emilio said. “I would even throw them away.”
“Now, they’re on the way to being gone,” she said.
One reason for the ube shortage is a lack of “planting material,” the cut-up ube pieces that farmers bury to grow new ones.
Ms. Emilio said farmers like her were selling almost all of their ube yields because of the higher price. By the end of the harvest season, there is little left to cut up and plant. While it can be grown from seed, that method is extremely slow and unreliable.
About 12 hours south by car, Jenelyn Bañares, an ube grower in the rural town of San Francisco in Quezon Province in southern Luzon had the same conundrum. “I’ve tried to buy from other farmers, but they also don’t have planting material,” she said
Then there is the threat of climate change.
Ube is considered one of the most resilient crops in the Philippines. It thrives in the equatorial archipelago’s dry and wet seasons, said Grace Backian, the leading ube researcher at Benguet State University.
Dry soil and strong sunlight push ube to root and leaf out. Rain then makes the tubers swell, sometimes up to 30 pounds. But that meteorological order has been upended due to climate change.
“Now, you never know when it’s going to rain and when it’s going to be sunny,” Ms. Bañares said.
The traditional “dry” months now bring showers, as stronger typhoons slam the islands more often. This November, at the start of ube harvest, two typhoons hit the archipelago in a week.
If there’s too much rain, ube suffocates, rotting back into the soil. If strong winds shred too many leaves, plants absorb too little sunlight and wither. When whole acres are wiped out, farmers have no quick fix. They wait for the next planting season to start again.
As ube farmers need more help, the Philippine government is offering less. Congress has trimmed the agriculture department’s already tiny budget for ube by about 10 percent to 10 million pesos, or about $170,000, for 2026, Ms. Natividad-Caballero said. The department plans to use the money to grow ube specifically for more planting material that it could give out to farmers.
Most of the department’s money goes to rice, corn and vegetables — a response to the fact that nearly one-third of children under 5 are physically stunted due to malnutrition, according to national health data. About one-third of adults show at least one sign of undernutrition, according to a 2021 paper.
There is also concern about a lack of support for a food that is important to the country’s cultural heritage.
The Philippines could watch its signature tuber slip away, said Jam Melchor, a Filipino chef who founded the advocacy group, the Philippine Culinary Heritage Movement. Ube is a main ingredient in halo-halo, a popular shaved-ice dessert layered with fruit, jellies and ice cream, often served at parties.
“Can you imagine a Philippine Christmas without ube? It feels like there’s something missing,” Mr. Melchor said. “And it feels like there’s something wrong.”
In the Benguet hills, Ms. Emilio set the ube she had extracted from the ground on a mossy rock outside her house, then leaned over a plastic basin to wash it. The water ran brown as she scrubbed the tuber with the side of her hand.
She said she started growing ube after pineapple season was over because it fed her during the rainy season. But ube also kept her close to her mother’s memory and to other farmers in town. At their meetings, she no longer felt alone on the hill.
She gave the ube a final splash and a pat.
“I think I will plant this,” she said.
The post The World Wants More Ube. Philippine Farmers Are Struggling to Keep Up. appeared first on New York Times.
