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MANILA (Reuters) – Amid a coronavirus lockdown in the Philippine capital, Grace Lagaday was struggling to breastfeed her newborn without milk storage bottles or nursing pads.
With shopping malls closed and public movement restricted, Lagaday turned to a centuries-old method of commerce with a new technological twist: online bartering.
A search of Facebook bartering groups found the supplies she needed for her baby and they were in Lagaday’s hands the next day, in exchange for bags of M & Ms chocolates and a jar of Nutella spread.
“I really needed things to breastfeed, but there were very few products available,” Lagaday told Reuters. “For a mother who gave birth during this pandemic season, bartering helped me find great deals for my baby.”
Lagaday, who has since traded clothes hangers for five kilograms of rice and an electric mosquito repellent for two liters of cooking oil, is among the hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have joined Facebook barter groups in recent years. months.
Reuters has identified just over 100 barter groups, some with as many as a quarter of a million members, that have emerged since the Philippine main island Luzon, home to half of its 107 million people, entered a harsh lockdown on mid-March that lasted two months.
Among the extreme exchanges: A 36-year-old man from Cebu province in the central Philippines traded in a 1993 Mitsubishi Lancer for 125,000 pesos ($ 2,574) in cash and canned goods, noodles and bags of rice that he distributed to the poor , while a 20-year-old college student, also from Cebu, swapped two buckets of fried chicken for a live game hen.
Barter trade has a long tradition in the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands that can make it difficult to transport goods at best.
Changing online practice was a natural progression in a country that is the most Internet-dependent in the world. Filipinos spend nearly 10 hours on the internet each day, compared to a global average of nearly seven hours, according to 2020 data from social media managers Hootsuite and We Are Social. Browsing on social media accounts for nearly four hours of that daily usage, the highest in the world, compared to an average of nearly 2.5 hours.
Google searches for “barter trade” increased 203% in April and May, and with Manila and nearby provinces still under some movement restrictions, Facebook groups are still buzzing with activity. Thousands of publications a day compete for attention for trade-ins for books, clothing, gadgets and accessories, glassware, appliances, automobiles, groceries, and animals.
An hour after offering her father’s game birds in exchange, Karly Jan Tañola went home with 16 pieces of fried chicken.
“I made a deal with the first person who commented and because of his enthusiasm for landing the fighting cock, he hurried off work and met me,” he told Reuters.
BACKFLIP POLICY
The resurgence of online bartering is causing the government some headaches. Commerce Secretary Ramón López performed an embarrassing backflip in July to assure people that exchanges for personal gain were fine just one day after he warned that bartering was an illegal practice to evade taxes. That stance had drawn the ire of thousands of social media users who criticized the government for finding new ways to levy taxes even amid the pandemic.
With the economy entering its first recession in nearly three decades and unemployment rising to an all-time high of 17.7% as a result of the pandemic, people expect to rely on online barter trade for some time.
“I sorted out old things to exchange with the people who need them,” said Josefa Amadure, who was looking for a baby rocking chair while planning the arrival of her second child. “Barter is popular and safe because it is not about cash.”
($ 1 = 48.5590 Philippine pesos)
Reporting by Neil Jerome Morales; Jane Wardell edition
