THE government’s self-sufficiency goal, which forced the Philippines to cut back on rice imports, is partly to blame for the instability in local rice prices, experts said on Wednesday.
Scientists and economists made this pronouncement in a forum titled “Rice Sufficiency: Price Rise and Importation Issues,” organized by the Social Sciences Division of the National Academy of Science and Technology.
“Unlike world prices, which have been on the decline in recent years, there has been a steady increase in Philippine rice prices, even in the years 2013 and 2014, when world prices were going down,” Dr. Isabelita M. Pabuayon, dean of the College of Economics and Management-University of the Philippines Los Baños, said in her presentation.
Pabuayon noted that the overall nominal price increases for rice from 1990 up to last year averaged 6.33 percent.
From 2010 to 2014, she said domestic rice prices are more than 50 percent higher than those recorded in Thailand and Vietnam.
“Imports in these years may have been insufficient to maintain stock levels that would permit domestic prices to be in line with world rice prices,” Pabuayon said.
She said limited stocks of National Food Authority rice may have created a view in the market that there are limited supplies, causing prices to increase.
It also did not help, Pabuayon said, that the government decided not to import large volumes of rice in its bid to buy more from domestic producers.
“Despite the policy goal of self-sufficiency, this was only achieved in the years 1991 to 1992.
The average rice sufficiency of the Philippines for the last 25 years was only 90.28 percent. Palay production was increasing at 3.35 percent per year,” Pabuayon said.
Dr. Flordeliza H. Bordey, senior science research specialist at the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), said the self-sufficiency target of the government had been costly for consumers.
“We cannot target rice self-sufficiency and have stable rice prices at the same time,” Bordey said.
Asked why the government has seemingly underimported in the early part of this year, Bordey said she cannot think of any other answer, save for the “political nature of rice importation.”
“Let us not fault the importation because aside from being a rice producer, we are also a major rice consumer,” Bordey said.
She said the drastic fall in rice imports in the last three years was mainly due to the self-sufficiency policy of the government.
In 2010 Agriculture Secretary Proceso J. Alcala had announced that the Philippines will phase out rice imports by 2013. The Department of Agriculture (DA) had said it will spend more on irrigation and mechanization to allow farmers to increase their yield.
1 comment
mahusay itong mga armchair experts that look at rice programs from the comfort of their
airconditioned room –