LEGAZPI CITY—The National Food Authority (NFA) has assured Bicolanos of sufficient rice supply until January next year, allaying apprehensions that the present calamity situation in most of Luzon would bring about a shortage of the staple grain in the region.

Edgar Bentulan, the NFA regional director for Bicol, said over the weekend the agency maintains a rice-stock position of at least 1.7 million bags of rice ready for disposal in the next three months.

The NFA regional office and all its warehouses across the Bicol region, Bentulan said, also have buffer stocks that include the 1.150 million bags of imported rice and over 680,000 bags acquired through the agency’s rice-procurement program that buys a kilo of palay at P17.

“We were able to purchase 1,051 bags of palay from the local farmers under the palay procurement program during the year,” he said.

Purchased from Camarines Sur were 750,673 bags of palay, Bentulan said.  The volume purchased showed a very significant growth in rice production that made Camarines Sur the No. 1 rice-producing province this year.

The province, a consistent surplus rice producer, stood out among the provinces of Bicol in terms of volume in palay production, the latest report of the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS) said.

The entire region posted a 17.3-percent palay production growth rate compared with the first semester of last year, the highest among the rice-producing regions, according to the BAS report.

The Ilocos region ranked second with a 13.08-percent growth rate for the same period, followed by Central Luzon which registered a 9.23-percent net production growth.

The BAS report attributes the remarkable performance of Bicol to the use of hybrid palay seeds by most farmers and the additional use of inputs and better irrigation system, Jose Dayao, the regional executive director of the Department of Agriculture (DA), earlier said.

A hybrid-rice variety, also referred to as the F1, is the direct product of crossing two genetically different parents. In hybrids, the positive qualities of both parents are combined, resulting in a phenomenon called “hybrid vigor” or “heterosis” that results in better reproductive characteristics.

These factors result in higher yields than ordinary rice by 15 percent, and with proper management, farmers harvest up to 240 cavans per hectare per season or 12 tons per hectare per year, Dayao explained.

The entire Bicol region had a total of about 291,000 hectares of land devoted to rice that contributed almost a million metric tons of the staple food to the country’s overall production per year.

Most of these areas, however, are still using ordinary rice variety, and certainly, when the DA is able to expand the coverage of the hybrid varieties in the region, Dayao said, “we expect more production.”

From Albay, the NFA palay-buying program obtained 127,131 bags; 84,979 from Camarines Norte; 44,638 from Masbate; 40,638 from Sorsogon; and 3,971 from Catanduanes, Bentulan said.

In the per-province stock situation, Bentulan said, Albay has a stock position of 650,382 bags that can last up to 123 days; Camarines Sur with 227,351 good for 44 days; Sorsogon, 99,931 for 67 days; Camarines Norte, 92,722 for 69 days; Masbate, 50,174 for 36 days; and Catanduanes, some 30,412 good for 22 days.

He based the duration of the rice-stock situation on the daily consumption in Bicol pegged at 42,980 bags, to where the NFA contributes some 16,000 bags daily in its sale at the government-subsidized price of P18 per kilo for indigent families and P28 in the open market.

Allocation of imported rice for Bicol this year is about 2.6 million bags.

“We expect to import more next year since palay production is expected to go down until the end of this year following several typhoons that wrought havoc to our rice plantations in the region,” Bentulan said.

At the same time, the region needs to further increase its production even as it registered the highest growth rate in palay yield compared with other regions in the country during the first semester of this year, he added.