Duterte to resolve NFA row next week

Last of two parts

PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte plans to meet the National Food Authority (NFA) Council next week to personally address the shortage of buffer stock of subsidized rice.

Leoncio Evasco, the secretary to the Cabinet who also heads the NFA Council, made the disclosure in an interview with The Manila Times, when asked about the controversies hounding the state grains agency. “The President will join the meeting of the NFA council, and he will make a statement on this matter. We will have a resolution after the meeting,” Evasco said.

The shortage of stocks of subsidized rice has revived persistent

allegations of a “rice cartel” or procurement program.

Because of the dwindling buffer stock, the agency stopped selling rice to accredited retailers, resulting in the unavailability of affordable rice in the market that then led to the spike in prices of commercial rice.

NFA Administrator Jason Aquino has welcomed any audit or inquiry into the agency’s rice distribution system.

But no less than Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol has claimed there were many instances of NFA rice being sold to “favored” retailers.

Most indebted agency

At the resumption of the Senate hearing on the NFA rice shortage, Roehlano Briones, senior research fellow of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies, told lawmakers the NFA was the most indebted government agency with a net worth of negative P150 billion based on 2017 data of Department of Budget and Management.

The NFA was also ineffective in its price stabilization function, which adheres to the policy of “buying high” from farmers and “selling low” to consumers.

He said the NFA’s objectives of ensuring farmers a reasonable return to their investment in rice cultivation and provide low prices for consumers were clearly in con to huge losses.

Yet the average share of actual NFA palay ( paddy rice) procurement to total production was only at 1.89 percent from 2000 to 2017.

Moreover, the agency’s annual procurement targets were never reached, except in 2008 and 2015, Briones said.

The volume of NFA rice distributed to consumers was also too NFA has failed to meet its annual distribution targets, except in 2013 and 2018.