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THE
country’s current rice problem is really not all that
serious. Trouble is, the actual situation has somehow
been blown out of proportion, sending the commercial
prices of the staple to “abnormal” levels which, in
turn, sent consumers on a mild and short-lived buying
frenzy—but only for cheaper government rice.
That,
more or less, is the assessment of Joji Co, president of
the Philippine Confederation of Grains Associations (Philcongrains),
who says the supply of rice anywhere in the country
remains adequate, if not plentiful.
Co does
not deny that the prices of local commercial rice
varieties have soared, but he also points out that
rising grain and food prices is a worldwide trend.
If there
is anybody who understands the workings of the
P15-billion rice industry in the Philippines, that
person is Co, who has been in the business long enough.
Philcongrains is a nationwide association of rice and
corn millers that counts some 10,000 of the country’s
11,000 millers. Co is chief executive officer of the
Isabela-based Herco Agro Industries, which runs one of
the few big state-of-the-art rice mills in the
Philippines.
From his
vantage point, here’s (more or less) his take of the
recent developments in the local rice trade:
Actually, there is no actual shortage overall, if you
add up all the household and government stocks
throughout the country. It just so happened that the
first major rice harvests that were expected to come in
mid-March this year have been delayed by two or three
weeks. The delay was caused by heavy rains in Isabela,
Nueva Ecija and Cagayan.
This
resulted in a disruption of supply because the milled
rice from the harvests of the last quarter of 2007 were
beginning to run out. The disruption sent the prices of
commercial varieties spiraling to as much as P32 a kilo.
This then created a scramble in the urban areas for
National Food Authority (NFA) rice, which is pegged at
P18.25 a kilo to help stabilize commercial rice prices.
The
scramble for NFA rice resulted in its “disappearance”
from the retail outlets. People came in droves to buy
the government-imported rice as fast as it could be
delivered. When the injection of NFA rice into the
retail outlets could not keep up with the demand, queues
for the government rice began to form and complaints of
a shortage became louder.
The
public uproar became even louder when the enterprising
media exposed cases of shenanigans in the trade, such as
hoarding and diversion of NFA rice to commercial
warehouses.
Ideally,
for price-estabilizing purposes, the NFA is mandated to
“inject” its imported stocks by as much as 15 percent of
the volume of commercial rice varieties being sold to
consumers. In actual practice, the NFA is rarely able to
bring into the retail trade more than 10 percent. Thus,
the news that part of the NFA’s stocks was being
diverted only made the public angrier.
Co
predicts that commercial rice prices will begin to
stabilize in a week or two when the new harvests begin
to fill the commercial rice warehouses once again.
He
stresses, however, that “while we may not have a real
crisis to deal with at the moment, our long-term view is
not as comforting. We foresee supply becoming
increasingly tight and prices becoming more prohibitive,
not only locally but internationally, as well.”
This
long-term view jibes with those of another rice expert,
former agriculture secretary Domingo Panganiban, who now
heads the National Antipoverty Commission.
Panganiban was the man behind, or field marshal, of the
late agriculture secretary Arturo Tanco Jr., who is
credited with the success of the Masagana 99
rice-production program under the late President
Ferdinand Marcos. It was the Masagana 99 rice program
that produced that “brief shining moment” in our history
when we didn’t have to import rice to meet local demand
between 1975 to 1978.
Panganiban believes that by simply keeping the country’s
irrigation facilities in top shape, the country wouldn’t
have to import so much rice as we do now. He estimates
that for every P1 billion spent for the clearing up of
heavily silted irrigation canals in the country, the
country would be able to produce an additional 300,000
metric tons of rice.
If that
is true, then the government needs only P4 billion for
irrigation to cut rice imports by 1.2 million metric
tons (MMT). This year, according to Agriculture
Secretary Arthur Yap, we will be importing some 2.2 MMT
of rice.
But
according to a high official of the National Irrigation
Administration, irrigation funds “have a tendency to get
hijacked for other purposes.” Recently, he revealed,
half of a P2-billion allocation was pulled out and
diverted for farm-to-market roads.
“But we
know the money was more of a farm-to-pocket expense than
anything else.”
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