State Intervention on Rice Industry Needed, Satur Insists

House Deputy Minority Leader and Bayan Muna Rep. Satur C. Ocampo today asserted that the government must intervene in the rice industry and decisively abandon rice trade liberalization to address the rice crisis at its roots.

Ocampo said the Arroyo government’s policy of rice importation to address shortfalls in domestic consumption requirements proves to be “a wrong and perilous approach to the crisis.”

“Due to Ms Arroyo’s rice importation policy, unscrupulous rice traders further justify to pull the prices of palay down to an average of P8 to P9 at the farm-gate and totally undermine efforts of farmers to increase production,” Ocampo said. “This buying rate at the farm-gate could hardly enable rice farmers to recover production costs.”

He said that “the current rice crisis shows that the Arroyo government’s rice importation policy completely failed even in the field of stabilizing prices in the market.”

At present, the cost of rice production ranges from P30,000 per hectare for certified seeds to P35,000 per hectare for hybrid seeds, among the highest in Southeast Asia and, being so, well beyond the reach of the majority of rice farmers.

The militant lawmaker also said that since the full-blown implementation of the rice trade liberalization policy following the country’s commitment to the World Trade Organization, the country spends about P10 billion a year to import one million metric tons of rice.

“This amount (1 MMT) can be produced locally with the government spending less in support of the rice farmers and the local rice industry,” Ocampo said.

Ocampo also said that “the Arroyo government’s conscious neglect of the agriculture sector and the rice sector in particular clearly shows why the agriculture remains backward, continue to suffer underproduction, and farmers remain poor.”

To illustrate his point, Ocampo cited figures from the peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas stating that, “less than one (1) per cent of our rice farmers use farm machines such as tractors and power tillers. The use of fertilizers is also low at five (5) bags per hectare as against the recommended level of eight (8) bags per hectare. At post-harvest level, mechanization is also poorly developed such that recovery is only 65 per cent while losses are at 15 – 20 per cent of total harvests.”

“The rice industry is still at a level of carabao farming ‘technology’,” Ocampo said.

The Bayan Muna lawmaker reiterated proposals for the government to abandon its agricultural trade liberalization policy, a stop to land-use conversion, the realignment of debt and war spending budget to food production, strengthening of the National Food Authority’s local procurement capacity by raising farm-gate prices, and the dismantling of rice cartels. #