CHEAPER RICE FOR SALE

CHEAPER RICE FOR SALE Although it is still a long shot from the campaign promise of PBBM that he will make rice available at 20 pesos per kilo, the present offer of the National Irrigation Authority (NIA) to sell at 29 pesos per kilo is already remarkable, even if the NIA rice is only available in a few Kadiwa outlets. Clearly, NIA Administrator Mr. Eduardo "Eddie" G. Guillen knows what he is doing, and the government should support him more, so that he could bring rice prices even lower. It appears that Mr. Guillen is a rare breed. He started as a a practicing engineer until he turned to politics, being elected as municipal mayor of Piddig, Ilocos Norte. In 2022, Piddig won an award as one of the top ten performing LGUs in the Philippines. Now away from politics but still a public servant, Guillen managed to perform the "miracle" of lowering the price of rice at practically half the prevailing price. What is interesting is that despite the fact that NIA's mandate is only irrigation, Guillen has seemingly extended his attention to post harvest activities, hence the lower rice prices. Talking about higher palay production and lower rice prices, whatever happened to Masagana 99? To those could not remember what that was, Masagana 99 was a palay production of the late PFEM circa 1973, wherein the goal was to produce 99 cavans of palay per hectare per cropping. Because of that, the Philippines even became a net exporter of rice, until the program fizzled out about seven years later. Very recently, I listened to a DA official being interviewed by a seemingly astute news anchor on a popular radio station. The anchor asked the official how many cavans the Filipino farmers are harvesting now, in relation to the Masagana 99 benchmark. The official tried to save face by saying that it was a surprise question, and he tried to calculate the numbers, as much as he could. Unable to answer the question, a more adept co-anchor butted in the theorize that it was an unfair question to ask, because the official was an agriculturist and not a mathematician. It appears that the DA does not really have a clear target of how many cavans per hectare they would want Filipino farmers to produce, given the supports that they could provide. The only clear target given to the DA by PBBM is to be able to sell rice at 20 pesos per kilo. Although I am just a writer and not a mathematician, I could roughly estimate that about one and a half kilos of palay are needed to produce one kilo of rice. In order to produce more kilos of rice per kilo of palay, the DA must work harder to improve the processes of harvesting, drying, milling and packaging. IKE SENERES/08-11-2024