The higher buying price for palay (unmilled rice) of the National Food Authority (NFA) helped in its procurement, NFA Administrator Larry Lacson said on Friday, May 31.
Lacson said the NFA has procured 97 percent of its first-half procurement target of 3.08 million 50-kilo bags of palay.
“At 2.93 million bags, we’re now at 97 percent of our buying target for the first half with the whole month of June left,” he stated.
With still one more month remaining, the NFA administrator is bullish that the agency would be able to hit the target, saying there are still a lot of areas with unharvested palay.
“Nakatulong ‘yung bagong buying price na hanggang P30 [per kilo]. Nakatulong nang husto (The new buying price as high as P30 a kilo helped a lot. It really helped),” Lacson said in a phone interview.
“Sa forum na ginawa ko, every one of them (farmers) ang ngiti nila ay hanggang tenga, kumita sila nang husto. Maybe kumita sila ng P100,000 kinita nila per hectare (In the forum I conducted, all of the farmers had smiles from ear to ear; they earned a lot. Maybe they earned P100,000 per hectare),” he added.
On April 11, the NFA Council increased the procurement price per kilogram of palay to a range of P23 to P30 for clean and dry from between P19 and P23 while the buying price for fresh and wet was increased to P17 to P23 from P16 to P19.
The NFA said that, before the increase in procurement price, they had purchased only 142,244 bags of palay, as private traders elevated their buying prices to ensure rice supply during the El Niño period.
Per Lacson, the NFA has only spent half of the P9 billion procurement budget for this year in procuring the additional 2.8 million bags of rice in the last six weeks.
Aside from the budget for this year, he said the NFA has P8 billion left over from last year’s procurement outlay to buy more rice stocks.
“Our problem now—and it is a pleasant one—is that we are running out of space in our warehouses, especially in Region II,” said Lacson.
To make room for additional palay stocks, the NFA chief has directed NFA personnel to start milling stocks to supply the 500,000 bags of rice required by the Department of Social Work and Development.