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THE
government is nurturing a new problematic agency in the
National Food Authority (NFA) by giving it billions of
pesos in subsidies every year.
According to Sen. Edgardo Angara, who chairs the Senate
Committee on Agriculture, the NFA has the makings of a
new Napocor, or the National Power Corp., whose
multibillion-dollar debts constituted the single-biggest
expense item on the nation’s budget for many years.
He told
financial reporters at a briefing in Makati City
Wednesday that NFA was likely to incur a deficit of P50
billion this year from the year-ago deficit of P17
billion.
Angara’s
forecast contrasted sharply with that of Finance
Secretary Margarito Teves, who earlier said the NFA
should incur a deficit of only around P43 billion, or P7
billion less than Angara’s projection.
Teves’s
forecast deficit was based on anticipated NFA rice
imports totaling 2.7 million metric tons at an average
price of $1,000 per ton.
“The NFA
is the next Napocor,”
Angara said of
the government-owned power firm whose distribution unit,
the National Transmission Corp., is undergoing
privatization.
“The NFA
should stick to its regulatory function, which is to
maintain the buying support for rice and corn. Subsidy
is really a loss, but you don’t have to incur
unnecessary loss which NFA either is deliberately
[losing] or making [us] believe it is losing because of
some corruption,” Angara said.
The NFA
helps stabilize the domestic price of the rice staple by
importing the commodity at cost but selling them at a
loss so the poorer segments can afford to buy them.
He
argued that the billions of pesos to be spent as
production subsidy for rice are better spent on farm
infrastructure, which have a longer-lasting impact in
terms of boosting the rice stock overall. |
