DA execs to help farmers sell rice to NFA
By Juan Escandor Jr.
Southern Luzon Bureau
First Posted 05:56:00 09/01/2008
PILI, CAMARINES SUR—Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap has ordered municipal agriculture officers (MAOs) to help enlist qualified farmers into selling their produce to the National Food Authority (NFA), according to a top agriculture official.
The NFA buys palay at P17 a kilo.
Marilyn V. Sta. Catalina, DA assistant regional director for operations and regulatory, said here on Friday that Yap’s move was prompted by complaints that farmers were not benefiting from the government’s palay procurement program through the NFA.
Sta. Catalina said Yap had to call her up and other agriculture officials one evening to address the issue of palay procurement raised by the MAOs in Camarines Sur province, that farmers could hardly sell their harvests to the NFA.
She said the secretary authorized the MAOs to enlist “genuine” farmers in their areas in the palay procurement program by assisting farmer-beneficiaries in the processing of applications for passbooks. The document qualifies farmers to sell their harvest to the NFA.
Sta. Catalina said farmers in several towns in Camarines Sur were claiming that traders were the ones benefiting from the NFA procurement program.
Incentives to farmers
Yap’s move to involve the MAOs in the NFA program would ensure that the genuine farmers are the ones benefiting because the officers know them and cooperatives in their areas, she said.
Aside from buying the harvest from the farmers at a relatively higher price, the government is providing incentives to farmers, such as a fertilizer subsidy of P1,800 for every 50 bags of rice sold to the NFA.
Sta. Catalina said the department was continuously monitoring the changes in the prices of palay and rice in the local market daily since July, as ordered by Yap.
Rice prices going down
Prices of commercial rice have steadily gone down since July, she said, citing the results of daily monitoring of the crop.
Prices of regular-milled commercial rice had gone down to P25.29 on Friday from P35 per kilo on July 8.
Well-milled commercial rice recorded prices ranging from P36 to P39 per kilo on July 8 to P30-P40 on Aug. 29.
Sta. Catalina said the monitoring of palay buying prices showed that in Camarines Sur, rice traders bought palay from the farmers at P11.72 to P11.80 per kilo on July 22 and P15.75 to P16 per kilo on Aug. 29.
Bicol, with some 99,000 hectares of irrigated and 46,000 hectares rain-fed rice farms, yields an average of 980,000 metric tons of palay every cropping season with an average yield of 3.2 MT per hectare, she said.
With a population of five million in 2005, the region consumes 565.3 MT of rice a year.
It is almost rice-sufficient, Sta. Catalina said, but production for local consumption had been diminished by buyers outside the region, who escaped their monitoring.
“It’s the principle of free enterprise that works,” she said.
She said the DA national office was continuously pushing for 100-percent rice sufficiency all over the country in 2010 through several strategies.
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