Fund lack could stymie PSA rice stocks survey

LIMITED budgets may constrain the government from surveying rice stocks held by commercial warehouses, which are owned and run by private traders and importers, according to a Congress official.

Novel Bangsal of the Congressional Policy and Budget Research Department (CPBRD) revealed that the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) may face challenges in conducting the commercial rice stocks survey (CSS), partly because of limited funding.

The CSS is a survey of the rice stocks held by commercial warehouses. Its conduct was turned over to the PSA from the National Food Authority (NFA) as mandated by the rice trade liberalization (RTL) law that took effect in 2019.

Under the implementing rules and regulations (IRR) of the RTL law, the final turnover of the CSS from the NFA to PSA shall be on July 1. The IRR also stipulated that the budgetary requirement for conducting the CSS starting this year “shall be provided” in the annual budget of the PSA.

Citing PSA, Bangsal said a 2020 budget for the PSA’S CSS was approved under the agency’s Tier 2 fund.

However, Bangsal added that whether the CSS indeed got appropriation for this year would still need to be verified amid government’s spending for Covid-19 efforts.

“Whether the PSA will be able to conduct the CSS this year is still something that we need tot verify,” he said at a webinar about the RTL law hosted by various farmers groups on Wednesday.

Less frequent

BANGSAL disclosed that due to PSA’S “low” budget for 2020 the agency may opt to reduce the frequency of the CSS from monthly to quarterly basis.

Citing PSA, Bangsal added that the agency may also just conduct the CSS at a national level instead of the planned provincial level, again, due to limited funds.

Bangsal also raised concern on how efficiently PSA can conduct the CSS since the rice industry has been deregulated and commercial warehouse owners may not easily cooperate unlike before, when NFA oversaw their licenses.

Bangsal pointed out that the PSA has yet to come up with a methodology for its CSS and a new methodology would mean the new rice stocks data could be incomparable to previous figures.

“Because there are changes in methodology, the new data won’t be comparable in previous stocks data since PSA does not have a methodology on how to do the CSS yet. This will be a challenge for the PSA,” he explained.

Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) National Manager Raul Q. Montemayor said the PSA may also have a hard time finding the right warehouses to survey since commercial warehouses no longer need to get a license to store rice.

“The law removed the licensing requirements for importers. This means that even if you do not have a license you can import rice. And this could be a challenge for PSA as they will not be easily able to track where the imported rice went and stored,” Montemayor said at the webinar.

Based on the latest memorandum order of the Department of Agriculture, interested rice importers should now submit as an additional requirement the list of their distribution points and warehouses.