IN the middle of a coronavirus lockdown in the Philippine capital, Grace Lagaday was struggling to breastfeed her newborn without milk storage bottles and nursing pads.
With shopping centres shut and public movement restricted, Lagaday turned to a centuries-old method of trade with a new tech twist – online bartering.
A search of Facebook barter trade groups found the supplies she needed for her baby girl and they were in Lagaday’s hands the next day, in return for bags of M&Ms chocolates and a jar of Nutella spread.
“I really needed breastfeeding stuff but very limited goods were available,” Lagaday said.
“For a mum who gave birth during this pandemic season, bartering helped me find good deals for my baby.”
Lagaday, who has since traded clothes hangers for 5kg of rice and an electric mosquito killer for two litres of cooking oil, is among hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have joined Facebook barter groups in recent months.
Reuters has identified just over 100 barter groups, some with as many as a quarter of a million members, have sprung up since the Philippines’ main island of Luzon, home to half its 107 million population, entered a hard lockdown in mid-March that lasted two months.
Among the extreme exchanges: a 36-year-old man from Cebu province in central Philippines traded a 1993 Mitsubishi Lancer for 125,000 pesos (RM10,740) in cash and canned goods, noodles, and sacks 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 gamefowl.
Barter trade has a long tradition in the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands that can make transportation of goods difficult at the best of times. — Reuters
With shopping centres shut and public movement restricted, Lagaday turned to a centuries-old method of trade with a new tech twist – online bartering.
A search of Facebook barter trade groups found the supplies she needed for her baby girl and they were in Lagaday’s hands the next day, in return for bags of M&Ms chocolates and a jar of Nutella spread.
“I really needed breastfeeding stuff but very limited goods were available,” Lagaday said.
“For a mum who gave birth during this pandemic season, bartering helped me find good deals for my baby.”
Lagaday, who has since traded clothes hangers for 5kg of rice and an electric mosquito killer for two litres of cooking oil, is among hundreds of thousands of Filipinos who have joined Facebook barter groups in recent months.
Reuters has identified just over 100 barter groups, some with as many as a quarter of a million members, have sprung up since the Philippines’ main island of Luzon, home to half its 107 million population, entered a hard lockdown in mid-March that lasted two months.
Among the extreme exchanges: a 36-year-old man from Cebu province in central Philippines traded a 1993 Mitsubishi Lancer for 125,000 pesos (RM10,740) in cash and canned goods, noodles, and sacks 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 gamefowl.
Barter trade has a long tradition in the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,600 islands that can make transportation of goods difficult at the best of times. — Reuters
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