By MADELAINE B. MIRAFLOR A group of farmers felt that Agriculture Secretary William Dar is downplaying the negative impacts of Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), which allowed large volume of rice imports to enter the country, resulting in the decline in palay prices. In a statement, the Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) said Dar belittled the harm RTL has inflicted on farmers more than a year since the law’s implementation. The RTL, which was enacted in March last year, removed quantitative restrictions and almost all government controls over rice imports. Dar, in a speech during the government’s celebration of RTL’s first year anniversary, said that RTL is the “best reform that ever happened to the Philippine agriculture sector”. He was also quoted as saying that farmers only lost P3.3 billion since RTL was passed and proceeded to question the validity of FFF’s earlier claim that farmers actually lost as much as P68 billion due to continuous decline in the price of palay. “The basis for our claim of P68 billion in farmer losses is very simple. The average price of palay, based on official data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) was P20.40 per kilogram (/kg) in 2018 and P16.78/kg in 2019, or a drop of P3.62/kg. Multiply that by the total palay output of 18.815 billion kilos in 2019 and you get P68 billion,” said Raul Montemayor, national manager of FFF. “Even if we compare 2019 prices with the 2016 to 2017 average of P17.82/kg, we still come up with a loss of almost P20 billion. You do not need to hire an economist and design complicated macroeconomic models to get these results,” he added. Last year, the Philippines’s palay output settled at slightly above 18 million metric tons (MT) of palay, which is the country’s lowest output for unhusked rice since 2016. The country also imported as much as 3 million MT of rice, making it the world's top rice importer, beating China. Right now, Dar and Senator Cynthia Villar is still banking on the RTL to make Filipino farmers more competitive and at par with their counterparts from neighboring rice-producing countries. Part of the RTL, the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF) is where the tariff from rice imports should go. It will then be utilized to provide support to farmers under four components including the provision of high-yielding rice seed, accessible loan and credit, training and extension, and mechanization. Initially, RCEF will run for six years with P10 billion sure funding from the government per year. According to Dar, through RCEF, farmers have increased their yields, availed of easy access-low interest financial credit, enhanced their knowledge and skills, and lowered production cost through mechanized farming systems. However, data from the Department of Agriculture (DA) showed that as of February 18, nothing from RCEF have been obligated and disbursed yet for the mechanization component of the RTL. Based on DA’s data, only P1.5 billion of the RCEF has been disbursed since last year and P4.50 billion has been obligated. Mechanization is the most crucial step in making farmers competitive because it can significantly lower their production cost. At present, the country’s farm mechanization level only stands at 2.1 horsepower per hectare, which means that 16 percent of the farmers' total production go to waste due to post-harvest losses. Because of this, the cost of producing rice in the Philippines remains high. To produce a kilo of rice, Filipino rice farmers have to spend P12.72, while it is only P6.22 per kilo in Vietnam and P8.86 per kilo in Thailand. If mechanization does not happen soon, rice farmers will have to bear the same level of production cost, while the surge of cheaper, imported rice in the local market keeps pulling down price of locally produced palay.