Marcos: Rice allowance eyed for government workers

President Bongbong Marcos in his speech during the tree-planting activity on the occasion of his 65th birthday in Rizal. Screengrab from RTVM video / Facebook

MANILA, Philippines — President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is planning to give government workers rice allowances in a bid to reduce hunger and help domestic rice producers.

“I’m going to initiate, at least for the government workers, the rice allowance. Part of the wages will be paid in rice so that we can make sure that everybody, every family will have rice,” the president said in a prerecorded interview aired on newly opened ALLTV on Tuesday.

He said the rice would be bought by the government at farmgate prices so that government workers would not have to buy them at market prices.

“Now, we don’t want to put the rice producers out of business. On the contrary, what’s going to happen is there will be a demand because a huge volume will be bought by the government,” the president said, adding that the private sector can also help farmers via rice allowances to their workers.

Campaign promise

On his campaign promise to bring the price of rice down to P20 a kilo, the president, who is concurrently agriculture secretary, said “there’s a way to do it but it will take a while.”

Marcos said that as part of keeping the price of rice stable, he plans to return the National Food Authority’s (NFA) power to buy more rice from farmers and not just for the agency’s buffer stocks.

“We have to return NFA to its old function — not so much importation, but really the buying. And then even actually now we can already do it but it’s a little short-term. We sell the buffer stock that they have in NFA. We can sell it at P20, but that’s not really realistic,” he recounted.

“That’s why, in my view, I talk about transforming our economy, not recovery. Because I don’t want to recover the economy to what it was in 2019. I want to transform the economy to be ready for the shocks, the difficulties that we will face from 2022,” he added.

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