For every 1 kilogram of rice available in the country last year, 850 grams came from Filipino farmers, as the Philippines’s rice self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) improved to 85 percent, the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) said.
PSA’s latest report showed that the country’s rice SSR last year improved from the 79.8 percent recorded in 2019.
“This ratio indicates that 85 percent of the domestic supply of rice came from the country’s own production,” the PSA said in its report titled “Agricultural Indicators System: Food Availability and Sufficiency.”
The PSA defines SSR as the “magnitude of production in relation to domestic utilization.” It is the extent to which a country’s supply of commodities is derived from its domestic production or the extent to which a country relies on its own production resources.
The Philippines posted a record palay output of 19.44 million metric tons (MMT) last year, while imports reached nearly 2.1 MMT, based on official government data.
The Department of Agriculture (DA) earlier claimed that the record-level palay harvest last year has raised the country’s rice SSR to 90 percent.
The increase in rice SSR last year meant a reduction in the staple’s import dependency ratio, or the extent to which a country’s supply of commodities came from imports, according to the PSA.
“Import dependency ratio of rice was down to 15 percent in 2020 as compared with the 20.2 percent in 2019. This implies that 15 percent of the domestic supply of rice came from imports,” the PSA said.
‘Review SSR formula’
Federation of Free Farmers National Manager Raul Q. Montemayor said the PSA must revisit its formula in computing SSR as “it doesn’t provide a realistic picture of the supply situation.”
Montemayor said the SSR formula is not benchmarked or pegged on the estimated total domestic requirement for a specific commodity. Due to this, the SSR will remain dependent on the volume of commodity imported in a given time period, he added.
The denominator of the PSA’s formula for SSR is the total supply of commodities as a result of the combination of production and imports less exports.
“If imports go down, there will be a tendency for the SSR to go up even if there is little increase in production,” he told the BusinessMirror.
“For me, the measure should be local production divided by total utilization for the year for food, feeds, waste and others. Meaning, what percent of our total requirement for rice was supplied by domestic production.”
Given these issues in the formula, Montemayor said the government’s SSR figures are “misleading” to policy-makers and even to market players.
“Assuming zero imports and exports, then SSR will be 100 percent even though domestic production is not enough for local demand. Meanwhile, even if domestic production is increasing, SSR will go down if imports grow faster.”
In 2018, former Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol criticized the PSA’s formula for deriving the SSR. He said the PSA includes rice imports in computing the SSR, which would always yield results that would indicate that local production is insufficient.