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A TOTAL
of 26 private-sector groups and farmers’ cooperatives,
individual and institutional users, such as Kentucky
Fried Chicken (KFC), took up 27,630 metric tons (MT) out
of the 200,000 MT allocated for the private sector in an
auction held Wednesday.
KFC took
up 25 MT, or 25,000 kilograms, of rice. QSR Corp., the
company that handles the importation requirements of KFC
and Mister Donut, said the food firm is “testing the
waters.”
The
bidding was conducted by state trading grains agency
National Food Authority (NFA). Twenty-one bidders
tendered for a total of 23,430 MT, while three
participants from Cebu tendered for 2,500 MT and two
groups from Davao submitted bids for 1,700 MT.
NFA
Assistant Secretary Conrado Ibañez said the government
expects more buyers now that the price of rice sold by
Thailand and Vietnam has already tempered. Both
countries, the NFA noted, are now in the middle of the
harvest season.
The NFA
said it will conduct two separate auctions, on June 20
and June 27, to bring in the remaining balance of what
it tendered yesterday.
A total
of 172,370 MT will be auctioned to the private sector on
June 20. The remaining volume from the June 20 tender
will be offered in a bidding scheduled for June 27.
So far,
a total of 1.46 million MT (MMT) have already arrived in
the Philippines, out of the 1.715 MMT contracted by the
government. The balance is expected to arrive in several
shipments until end-August.
In Davao
City, the NFA began to auction special-grade rice from
Thailand in a pilot project to be applied nationwide to
taper off spiraling rice prices, which have begun to
lower by P3/kg.
The
rice, graded at below 25 percent broken grains, will be
sold at a mandated price of not more than P35/kg at
retail price, increasing further the presence of
government-subsidized rice to combat spiraling price
believed triggered by manipulations of the market.
Filemon
Cangrejo, assistant manager of the NFA Davao office,
credited the new strategy and the previous interventions
of the NFA to the noticeable decrease in the price of
rice in the market this week.
“We are
happy to notice than even before we started to auction
this week, prices have begun to move. In the wholesale,
it’s about P5/kg to P7/kg, and about P3/kg in the
retail,” he said. “We are beginning to see prices at
P40/kg, down from P43/kg last week.”
“This
move is meant to tell the traders that they should begin
to rethink their pricing of rice,” he said, “because we
are auctioning at a level that would not be a losing
proposition for government but could sustain the move in
a longer term, probably up to August.”
He told
the BusinessMirror the strategy was to auction off 5,000
sacks of special-grade rice weekly, but only to licensed
retailers in the city, “where we sell them at P33/kg and
with retailers allowed to put a maximum markup of only
P3/kg.”
“That
means the consumers would get them at P35/kg,” he said.
The move
was the third in a series of interventions into the
sudden surge of prices that began in April, when rice
prices were at P26/kg for the regular milled rice, and
which went up to as high as P52/kg last week in many
parts of the Davao region.
Cangrejo
said the auction emerged as a suggestion from retailers
in a meeting with NFA Administrator Jessup Navarro, who
went to Davao in the middle of the controversy that
placed suspicion on both the millers and traders for
allegedly manipulated prices.
To avoid
suspicion among consumers, Cangrejo said the NFA would
also rebag the NFA rice in especially printed commercial
sacks to help them also monitor the movement of rice.
“The
auction strategy is the first in the country and the
first in Mindanao, and is being tested here first,”
Cangrejo said.
He said
NFA released a second variety of rice, the Thailand
rice, last month to attract the middle class away from
the lower-grade Vietnam rice that was supposed to be
prioritized for poor consumers.
The
second move was increasing the allocation of each NFA-licensed
retailer, from only 15 in April to 35 in May. Last week,
the allocation in the three markets in Davao City—Bankerohan,
Agdao and Toril—was further increased to 45 bags a week
for each retailer. For the retailers in other areas, the
allocation was 40 bags, and 28 bags for those in smaller
barangays. |
