CABANATUAN CITY—The National Food Authority (NFA) here will adopt a “color-coding” scheme to further organize the system in selling government-subsidized rice.

NFA Nueva Ecija manager Edelino Alejandro said the scheme, called the “color- allocation card,” will start next week. He said the buyers, mostly from Cabanatuan City poor communities, will be issued two sets of yellow and white allocation cards.

A yellow card entitles the buyer 7 kilos of the P18.25-a-kilo NFA rice on Mondays and Wednesdays. A White card, on the other hand, will be used on Tuesdays and Thursdays for another 7 kilos. There is no lining up on Fridays as the NFA personnel who man the counter have to attend to their usual duties at the office.

“They [buyers] can then buy 14 kilos a week. They said during a consultation meeting that they could not afford to buy 14 kilos at one time, so what we agreed was split the selling schedule,” Alejandro told the BusinessMirror Tuesday. He said they identified 1,200 regular buyers in Cabanatuan City to be issued the color-allocation cards.

The color rice cards, Alejandro said, will also lessen the burden of the buyers who earlier complained of lining up at dawn at the gate of the NFA compound in Cabanatuan City to enlist with the security guards, then back to queue again to the selling counter showing the ration sheet to the rice tenders at around 9 a.m.

They would again line up in the afternoon with another ration sheet for another round of 3 kilos of the cheap rice. From Monday to Friday, then, each buyer would have bought 30 kilos.

Alejandro also said some were observed to have exploited  system by getting some proxies to be able to get extra packs to be sold to their neighbors who have no time to line up, at, of course, marked-up cost.

Meanwhile, the other consumers continued to line up as early as 7 a.m. for the limited 1-kilo quota in 78 NFA-accredited rice clusters around Nueva Ecja. Apart from those clusters, NFA rice is also available in 45 Tindahan Natin outlets operated by the Department of Social Welfare and Developmentand 16 Catholic Church outlets.

Each Tindahan Natin and Catholic Church outlet is allocated 20 sacks of NFA rice every week, Alejandro said.

BOCAUE, Bulacan—As speculations of rice shortage for the coming lean months of palay from June to September grow, commercial palay price has reached an all-time high of P21 per kilo.

CABANATUAN CITY—The National Food Authority (NFA) here will adopt a “color-coding” scheme to further organize the system in selling government-subsidized rice.

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