The chairman of the House of Representatives’ committee on appropriations has urged the Department of Agriculture to run after rice hoarders and smugglers in compliance to President Rodrigo Duterte’s directive to get rid of rice syndicates, rice smugglers and rice hoarders.
“The President, in his State of the Nation Address, gave a very stern warning to all of these rice syndicates, rice smugglers, rice hoarders and all of these people. So what can you say about it?” Davao City Rep. Karlo Nograles, the panel’s chairman, asked DA Secretary Manny Piñol during the panel’s deliberations on the agency’s proposed budget of P55.9 billion for 2019.
Before throwing this question, Nograles said the current shortage of “NFA rice” was the cheapest rice variety in the market at P27 per kilo.
This is about half the price of commercial rice and is the one usually bought by poor Filipinos, if they have money for food at all.
Also on Thursday, Camarines Sur Rep. Luis Raymund Villafuerte said the bill liberalizing rice imports would result in a decrease in the price of the staple by as much as P7 per kilo and set up a support fund that would enable palay growers to raise their harvests while lowering their production costs.
Villafuerte said that with the President’s endorsement of the rice tariffication bill, it was incumbent upon both chambers of the Congress to prioritize its passage to reduce rice prices.
The price of the staple has been going up owing to the supply shortfall and volatile prices of the grain in the domestic retail market.
“The rice tariffication bill will hit two birds with one stone: it will help pull down rice prices and stabilize its supply while helping our farmers become competitive,” Villafuerte, vice chairman of the House committees on appropriations and local government, said.
Nograles said certain rice traders were purposely hoarding rice.
“[There] is a problem with how we distribute the NFA rice and make it accessible to people with the presence of rice hoarders, rice syndicates who create the artificial shortage,” Nograles said.
In response, Piñol said that Nograles’s observation was “not unfounded.”
“Last year, in General Santos City, the NBI [National Bureau of Investigation]raided a warehouse where NFA rice was being repacked. So it was not unfounded, but it was not as rampant as people believe it to be,” claimed the DA chief.
Piñol said dubious rice repacking activities involved the mixing of cheap NFA rice into commercial rice varieties.
This way, rice traders can turn a bigger profit.
“I am happy to report that since the President made his statement at the Sona, the Bureau of Customs [BoC], NBI and the police have already been scouring warehouses. In fact, there was already a raid conducted in Laguna which yielded P25 million worth of undocumented rice,” he told the Nograles panel.
Piñol added that BuCor had done a “splendid job” in curbing rice smuggling in the country’s southern backdoor where smuggled rice from Malaysia used to enter.