Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said Wednesday the government could drastically bring down rice prices but warned that millions of rice farmers would be adversely affected if productivity stays at current levels.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has promised during the presidential campaign to bring down the price of rice to P20 a kilo. But a year after he took over the reins of the Department of Agriculture, the price of the staple has remained high. Sufficiency of supply is also an issue.
The latest price data from the agriculture department showed a kilo of rice costs between P41 and P65—more than double the price promised by President Marcos Jr. Rice has a hefty weight in the consumer basket used to measure inflation.
“You can actually do that (bring down rice price),” Balisacan told reporters at a briefing in Malacanang. “But if you don’t increase productivity, farmers will suffer,” he added.
There around 2.4 million Filipino rice farmers, with their average output per hectare at 4 tons per hectare. You need almost two kilos of palay to produce a kilo of milled rice. The National Food Authority buys palay at around P20 a kilo.
Balisacan said increasing productivity to around 6 tons a hectare will require a large amount of investment, particularly in resilient irrigation, better rice varieties, post-harvest facilities, and logistics.
“Unfortunately that can’t be done overnight…we have neglected agriculture for decades,” said Balisacan.
“There are many constraints that we are addressing,” he added.
Included in Balisacan’s long list of jobs is as former director-chief executive at Southeast Asian Regional Centre for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture, and a former undersecretary for policy and planning at the Department of Agriculture.
