DESPITE a record-high palay harvest last year, the country’s rice self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) in 2017 dropped to 93.44 percent, from 95.01 percent in 2016, according to a report from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).
In its annual report titled, “Food Sufficiency and Security,” the PSA said the decline in the country’s rice SSR was due to the increase in the volume of imports.
“The decline in the SSR of rice was attributed to the reduced share of domestic production to the country’s supply while the share of rice imports increased,” it said in the report published recently.
SSR is the extent to which a country’s local production of commodities is adequate enough to meet the demand of the whole population, the PSA added.
An SSR lower than 100 percent means that the local production couldn’t meet the country’s requirement for a specific commodity, while an SSR greater than 100 percent indicates that domestic production is more than enough to support the domestic requirements, the PSA said.
“The higher the ratio, the greater the self-sufficiency,” it added.
In the same report, the PSA said the country’s rice import dependency ratio, or the amount of supply being sourced abroad to meet local demand, grew to 6.56 percent last year, from 4.99 percent in 2016.
“This means that 6.56 percent of the available domestic supply of rice came from imports,” it said.
The country’s rice imports in 2017 grew by 44.42 percent to 880,085.9 metric tons, from 609,363.6 MT recorded in 2016, PSA data showed.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel F. Piñol criticized the PSA’s estimates, arguing that the agency’s formula for deriving the SSR is “flawed.”
Piñol explained that the PSA includes rice import in computing the SSR, which would always yield results indicating that local production is insufficient.
He said the country’s rice SSR should have been higher than the 2016 level due to higher palay production in 2017.
The country’s palay output last year rose by 9.54 percent to 19.28 million metric tons, from 17.6 MMT in 2016. At a 65.4-percent average milling recovery rate, the country produced 12.609 MMT of milled rice in 2017.
Piñol said the 1.092-MMT increase in local palay production last year should have been sufficient to offset the increase in demand for the staple caused by population growth.
“At a per-capita consumption of 114 kilos, that would mean we produced enough rice to feed an additional 9.5 million Filipinos between 2016 and 2017. Our population growth is 1.4 percent, meaning only about 1.4 million Filipinos were born between 2016 and 2017,” he told the BusinessMirror in an interview on Wednesday.
“The PSA computation is flawed and inconsistent. It should be higher, based on the production numbers,” he added.
Piñol said he has ordered the Philippine Rice Research Institute to come up with its own formula in determining the country’s rice SSR “to come up with a more reliable” figure.