The Department of Agriculture (DA) has stressed the need for major investments in agriculture infrastructure to enhance rice production, minimize wastage, and ensure the country's food security.

Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel, Jr. said on Wednesday, Jan. 17, that the country needs to invest approximately P1.3 trillion over the next few years to meet the requirements of the farm sector.

Furthermore, Laurel highlighted the necessity of P1.2 trillion in capital expenditure to irrigate 1.2 million hectares of farmland, particularly rice fields.

“No major post-harvest facility was funded by the government in the last 40 years,” Laurel said in a statement. "Purely small and piecemeal, which is actually irrelevant and useless.”

“We need really to fund these projects. But we must build bigger. We have three designs—small, medium and large, not mini,” he added.

As an illustration, Laurel said that the construction of integrated rice mill and warehouse complexes will reduce rice losses by 15 percent resulting from the lack of post-harvest facilities. However, this will require P90 billion in investments over several years.

Laurel pointed out that implementing proper warehousing alone could generate an additional 23 days' worth of rice inventory, equivalent to 10 percent of last year's imports, or P10.7 billion.

“[This year], P1 billion was allocated to build four cold storage facilities, primarily at the Food Terminal Inc. [FTI] complex in Taguig City, to partly address the recurrent oversupply and wastage of vegetables in parts of Luzon alone,” he explained.

The agriculture sector also seeks an additional P5 billion to solve the vegetable cold-storage situation by having a 5,000-pallet position storage in FTI.

The construction would take 12 months and is expected to be operational in over a year.

Currently, 30 percent of losses that were passed on to the market were recorded by traders who transport vegetables from Benguet to Metro Manila.

“The main government agency that should address the oversupply [of vegetable and high-value crops] is the local government units (LGUs),” Laurel emphasized. “Because many agricultural functions have been devolved.”

Meanwhile, the DA chief said that the P20 per kilo rice is still an aspirational target, but would take several years to achieve.

The Agriculture sector is still working around the El Niño phenomenon that also increased the global rice prices.

According to him, the Philippine rice in Vietnam is around P34 per kilo because of the high demand given the nations’ current stockpiling.