The National Irrigation Administration (NIA) assured that selling rice would not compete with traders, and instead would assist them.

In a statement, the NIA shared its plan to sell a kilo of rice for P29 by August, through the Contract Farming program. This initiative would allow farmers to produce rice at a predetermined market price for procurement.

NIA Administrator Eduardo Guillen expects the program to produce 100 million kilos of rice within 40,000 hectares of land.

“This step would consolidate the farmers does not mean any competition against traders, rather we want to help them,” Guillen clarified.

When asked how the volume of rice would be produced, he described two seed varieties– inbred and hybrid. He stated “If it’s inbred, the regular yield would be at around 5 tons. With the National Food Authority’s [NFA] formula, we could produce 3,150 kilos, resulting in a P9.50 total production cost.”

If 100 percent yield is given to farmers, NIA believed this would cost around P30,000.

“Even if the production costs amount to less than P20 per kilo, farmers will still earn from this.”

On the other hand, Guillen said that hybrid seeds are quite an investment, but would still exert large amounts of harvests.

The program is a collaborative effort with various Agriculture agencies, like the Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (Philmech), the Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice), the National Rice Program (NRP), and more.

The NIA chief also commends the Irrigators Association (IA) for helping them bring down the rice price to P20 per kilo in Kadiwa stores.

Guillen believed that farmers and farmer cooperatives would gain earnings from the initiative.

“If we sell rice for P40 a kilo, we’re adding 20 pesos to our cooperatives,” he said.

The NIA also predicted that this year alone could generate 5 million kilos of rice worth P1 million, if “we could produce 5 tons in production for every 1,000 hectares of rice land.”