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Friday, March 29, 2024

Rice politics

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Tarpaulins are being produced in industrial scale in this part of the world. Aside from the blare of campaign jingles, the only other thing being churned out nonstop are those   posters that further blight our   already blighted landscape.

If only such tarps were used to dry palay, they would have saved mega-millions of   kilos of palay from post-harvest losses.

But alas, those billboards, with the photoshopped visage and performance of those on them,   are used instead, mostly, for false advertising.     

Hopefully, they can be recycled   for something of true value, as drying mats of palay, copra, corn. If the MMDA people continue to   confiscate trucks of them, my advice is that they be donated to farmers’ cooperatives that can repurpose them into something useful.

Here’s   also my advice to politicos: Hope your  trapal-displaying spree would extend beyond the first  Monday  of May.     You can   wall-to-wall the countryside   with tarpaulins for as long as they’re spread out as drying mats on the ground and not hang vertically as oversized Hallmark greeting cards. 

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This brings me to the topic, silent in the stump oratory of presidential wannabes, of how we love rice but   waste billions of kilos of them.   

There is this joke about how countries prevent their roads from deteriorating. The Germans pour sealants on cracks, the Japanese top theirs with asphalt and the Filipinos spread palay on them—because anything covered with grains will be spared the wear-and-tear caused by vehicular traffic.

And it is the time of the year when Philippine rural roads turn golden brown. This seasonal change in highway hue is caused by the fact that you can’t mill palay without drying it first.

Here’s Rice 101. Drying unglues the grain from the husk, preserves it, makes it strong, so when milled, it would easily separate from the chaff, and will come out as a polished whole and not as broken grits or, worse, pulverized.

So this is one of rice’s many idiosyncrasies. Take for example, drying. Simple as it may seem, palay follows a tiring demoisturizing ritual.

Palay has to be bagged, transported, unbagged, spread out, raked, rebagged, and transported again to storage.

In 2014,   the Philippines produced 19 million tons of palay, or 380 million bags, each of which must be dried, mostly under the sun and a miniscule portion in mechanical dryers fed by biomass and other fuels.

Because sun-drying is the norm, farmers have no choice but to find any heat-conducting flat surface. Thus, plazas are taken over, and in basketball courts this substitution is called: players out, palay in.

But most go to national roads which, for lack of non-street pavements. Obviously, palay on the road poses a danger to motorists. It slows down traffic and makes our already congested roads narrower.

The bigger the swath of the road commandeered for palay drying, the bigger danger it poses to motorists.   Food security is also hit, big-time.

Studies show that we lose 16.5 percent of our rice output to lack of, or poor, post-harvest facilities or practices. Crunch the numbers. This means that even if our yearly grain output climbs to 20 million metric tons yearly, 3.3 MMT will be lost lack of dryers, dearth of storage, outdated milling technology.

That’s 66 million sacks of wasted rice, enough to gift each of the 105 million unli-rice-loving Pinoys 31 kilos.

Or if annual per capita rice consumption in this part of the world is 114 kilograms, then all that wasted rice would be enough to meet the rice needs of 22 million Mindanaoans, pro-BBL or not, for one year and four months.

Government is addressing drying losses   through   Rice Processing Complexes, or RPCs which have a paved drying surface on their yard.

But even if government builds more RPCs, these won’t be enough to meet the demand. Each can only accommodate 600 sacks of palay in its biomass-fed dryers every eight hours. And there’s the element of cost. The fee of P40 per bag is hard to bear for farmers struggling with thin if not negative profits.

A recourse is to build more solar dryers, either by paving farm-to-market roads so these could function as drying surfaces during the harvest season, or build more barrio basketball courts with a dual purpose.   These, however, come at a cost. The DPWH price tag for a kilometer of concrete road is about P20 million.

But there are practical solutions which do not burn a hole in the taxpayer’s pocket, things which have escaped the attention of planners used to big-ticket items.

One of which is to give farmers a couple of 60-square meter trapals, which are effective drying mats, and which can be bought for less than P1,000 in Divisoria.

If a farmer has a rubberized trapal, he will no longer lug his palay to the nearest public road for drying. He can do it in his just harvested field. He will not impede traffic, and grains will not be blown away by cars whizzing by.

When it rains, his palay is protected. And he can use his trapal as canopy for fiestas, baptism and emergency roofing during typhoons.

It is cheaper, too. One-fourth kilometer of concrete road cum solar dryer will cost millions and takes years to build. Or,   for a fraction of that cost, plus quick delivery, and a drying surface thousands of times larger, government can supply farmers with trapals as a supplemental drying equipment.

Actually, government has been buying trapals in bulk, by the millions. The only problem is that they’re used for epal tarpaulins.

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