DAVAO CITY—The Philippines will import an additional 750,000 metric tons (MT) of rice to ensure the affordability of the staple, the National Economic and Development Authority (Neda) said on Thursday.
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia said the government needs to prepare as early as now to prevent price spikes that may be caused by the shortfall in rice supply.
“We need to prepare for the deficiency next year that will be sure to come,” Pernia told reporters in a news briefing on the second quarter GDP here.
“We need to buy now while rice remains affordable. Otherwise, we will experience what happened in 2013 to 2015, when prices spiked sharply, causing poverty incidence to [worsen],” he added.
To beef up the country’s rice stocks, Pernia said the government has decided to buy 1 million metric tons of imported rice. Manila has earlier announced that it will import 250,000 MT of rice.
Of the additional 750,000 MT that Manila will import, 500,000 MT will be purchased via the government-to-government arrangement, while the rest will be procured through the minimum access volume scheme.
The Philippines has existing rice-supply agreements with Vietnam and Thailand—two major exporters of the staple in the region.
Pernia said the importation of more rice was discussed in a recent meeting of the Inter-Agency Committee on Rice and Corn, in which Neda is a member.
“The first tranche should be arriving within the year, maybe over the next few months. So we are prepared for the next few months when we will have rice deficits,” Pernia said.
Last week, data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that palay and corn production in the second quarter registered cuts of 6.10 percent and 10 percent, respectively. This was cited as a major factor behind the 2.34-percent contraction in farm output during the period.
“The prolonged dry spell due to El Niño negatively affected the production of the crops and fisheries subsectors,” the PSA said.
University of the Philippines School of Statistics Dean Dennis Mapa earlier said the poorest Filipinos are “very sensitive” to food prices, particularly rice.
Mapa said this can be explained by the difference in the inflation felt by all households and the inflation experienced by the bottom 30 percent, or the poorest Filipinos.
He said the weight of food in the basket of goods used for the computation of the inflation experienced by the poorest 30 percent is 70 percent, compared to 39 percent for all the households.
Data from the PSA showed poverty incidence among Filipinos in the first half of 2015 was at 26.3 percent, lower than the 27.9 percent recorded in the same period in 2012.