Our rice program with Papua New Guinea

PAPUA New Guinea (PNG) was in the news this week as the site of this year’s Asia Pacific Economic Conference (APEC) meeting, with the leaders of 21 member economies in the region in attendance. For the first time in its 25-year history, it ended Sunday without issuing a formal statement, as its two biggest members – the United States and China – were unable to reach agreement on trade.

President Duterte led the Philippine delegation to the conference held at Port Moresby, capital of Papua New Guinea. While the APEC ended on such a negative note, our own officials were there not just for APEC but also for a bilateral program with that country southeast of the Philippines, just north of Australia. That program is for the production of rice by Filipino farmers on 50,000 hectares of land in East Sepik province.

Secretary of Agriculture Emmanuel Piñol said at Port Moresby that Filipino farmers now have a rice demonstration farm there which, he said, is doing very well because of the fertile soil. Its first harvest is expected in the last week of December.

While rice production costs in the Philippines amount to R12 per kilo, compared to Vietnam’s R7 per kilo, Secretary Piñol said Filipino famers can match Vietnam’s low production cost with rice farms in Papua New Guinea because of the fertility of the land and the abundance of water. The East Sepik River is said to be one of the largest rivers in the world.

The plan is to develop first 100,000 hectares to produce some 400,000 metric tons of rice to meet the needs of Papua New Guinea’s population of 8 million people. Piñol said he hopes some 1 million hectares of PNG’s 46 million hectares of fertile land will eventually be made available for the Philippine rice program. In five years, we should be able to ship the first rice from PNG to the Philippines, he said.

Philippine rice production today is held back by several factors, including our limited arable land area of just over 9 million hectares which is steadily decreasing due to urban development to meet the needs of our 107 million people. We also have limited water supply which is important in rice faming. But we have new high-yielding and disease-resistant rice varieties developed by our scientists over the years.

The idea of reaching out to largely underdeveloped Papua New Guinea was an inspired idea that should reap benefits for both our countries. This neighbor of ours in the South Pacific may well serve, in the words of Secretary Piñol, as the Philippines’ food security insurance.