The Palace said Thursday that the country’s rice situation will normalize next month as it defended Agriculture Secretary Manny Piñol from growing calls for him to resign.
“We foresee the rice situation normalizing because the main harvest is beginning to come in by next month,” said Presidential Spokesman Harry Roque in a statement sent to media Thursday afternoon.
Roque said the Department of Agriculture will establish a rice trading post where the government can collect customs duty on legally imported rice with import permit from the National Food Authority.
“The amount of imports to be allowed will be enough to cover the needs of the Zamboanga, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi [Zambasulta] areas,” he said.
Asked if President Rodrigo Duterte still trusts Piñol amid mounting calls for him to resign, Roque said yes.
Piñol has been criticized as prices of the main staple have risen sharply under his watch. He has also been lambasted for his idea to allow rice smugglers to operate legitimately in Zambasulta.
In the House, AKO Bicol Party-list Rep. Alfredo Garbin said Piñol’s idea to legalize rice smuggling in Basilan and Zamboanga, where prices reached P70 per kilo, was tantamount to economic sabotage.
But Roque said Piñol was misquoted.
“We understand Agriculture Secretary Piñol was misquoted on the issue of legalized smuggling of rice in Zamboanga,” he said. Piñol then eventually clarified that what he wants is for smugglers to become legal rice traders themselves.
House Minority Leader Danilo Suarez, meanwhile, warned that the budget of the department could be held up in plenary deliberations.
“The Philippines is an agricultural country with our lush greenery, cultivated fields, and rich aquatic ecosystems. It is befuddling that the Department of Agriculture proposed the importation of rice and ‘galunggong’ from other Asian countries. Rice and ‘galunggong’ are staples of the Filipino diet,” Suarez said.
Opposition Senators Francis Pangilinan and Paolo Benigno Aquino IV sought to probe the rice crisis in Zamboanga City and the eight-month hike in rice prices in the country, as reported by the Philippine Statistics Authority.
They added that the National Food Authority “must explain the said shortage, the alleged hoarding, and how the situation in Zamboanga City reached calamity level.”
NFA Administrator Jayson Aquino on Thursday said his agency had nothing to do with the rice crisis in southern Mindanao.
“The rice crisis in Zamboanga City happened not because of NFA’s inefficiency or incompetence. It was due to the significant depletion of commercial rice stocks in the market, the unavailability of commercial rice sources due to the closure of the Malaysian border, which led to the sudden price surges, and the declaration of state of calamity in Zamboanga City to allow the local government to control rice prices and purchase buffer stocks using calamity funds,” he said.
He lamented the “collective blame hurled against the agency for the current problems on high commercial rice prices and inflation.”
The agency does not want to point fingers and pass the blame on others, and instead would continue to give its “best service to the people in all corners of the country,” he said.
“We have been quietly doing our work. We don’t brag about it. We go out to the field to mingle with local officials, talk to the local folk, feel their pulse, know their problems and offer solutions rather than empty promises,” he said.
According to the NFA chief, he has been working on coordinating the replenishment of the NFA rice stocks in Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi with the additional inventories from other NFA regional offices sent through the ports of Jolo and Zamboanga at the onset of the increase of rice prices.
He said the rice crisis in Zamboanga has been “greatly eased with the quick response from the NFA that beefed up its food security stocks from the onset of the sudden increase of commercial rice prices,
bringing in supplies from other regions to increase its market injection to 2,000 bags a day or about half of the regions’s 5,340 bags daily rice requirements.”
He said the rice crisis in Zamboanga “has been declared solved over the weekend, but the NFA continues to distribute its P27-per-kilogram well-milled rice in the market even as cheaper commercial rice varieties are also flooding in.”
“We do not expect to immediately lower the prices of commercial rice in the area, but with the steady presence of NFA rice, we are providing an alternative cheaper but good quality rice variant for our poor and marginalized sectors,” he said.
At the same time, the NFA said it does not sell rice with weevils.
The agency issued this clarification in view of reports that NFA’s imported rice being sold in the markets is filled with ‘bukbok,’ causing panic among consumers.
“The infested stocks are not yet NFA-owned. In fact, it was NFA technical personnel inspecting the imported rice deliveries that blocked the delivery of the infested stocks to the agency’s designated warehouse in Legazpi City,” Aquino said.
The supplier will handle the cost of fumigation of the infested stocks. Afterward, it will still be subject to standard inspection and evaluation by NFA’s technical experts before these are finally accepted, based on the quality specifications stipulated in the contract. The infested portion of imported deliveries constitute a mere 0.02 percent of the total volume of NFA imported rice, he said.
“Bukbok” in rice is safe. It is washed away and separated from the grains before cooking. Fumigation, on the other hand, is a natural process of arresting grain infestation. It is a standard protocol of good warehouse-keeping,” the NFA said in a statement.
On Thursday, Senator Cynthia Villar, chairman of the Senate committee on food and agriculture, called for price ceilings on rice in the Zambasulta area.
“I think the rice is in the hands of rice traders, and if we don’t put a price ceiling, we cannot control it,” she said in Filipino.
She said the law allowed the government to set a price ceiling on a commodity if it felt there was extensive price manipulation.
A state of calamity has been declared in Zamboanga City and Basilan, where rice prices have gone up to as high as P70 a kilo.
