Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel Jr. has stepped into the spreading controversy over the discounted sale of government rice by ordering an audit of National Food Authority rice allocations from 2019.

It was in 2019 that the Rice Tariffication Law took effect, and the NFA’s mandate was reduced from being an importing monopoly to overseeing the nation’s buffer stock for use during natural and man-made calamities.

The Department of Agriculture’s Internal Audit Service, now headed by officer-in-charge Joan Jagonos-Oliva, will review NFA stocks for the past five years.

“DA-NFA officials and personnel are directed to extend their full assistance and cooperation to the DA-IAS to ensure the successful conduct of this audit,” Laurel said.

“We want to see if there was a pattern of rice disposition that was disadvantageous to the government,” he said.

The RTL bars the NFA from selling rice to the public, but it allows the agency to replenish its stock by selling expiring stocks to traders, a provision that unscrupulous officials and traders may have exploited.

On Monday, the Ombudsman ordered the preventive suspension of 139 NFA officials and employees, including administrator Roderico Bioco and assistant administrator for operations John Robert Hermano.

The anti-graft body issued the preventive suspension orders to clear the way for its inquiry into allegations of corruption in the alleged sale to private traders of around 75,000 50-kilo bags of rice.

Bioco last week defended his decision to allow the sale of approximately 200,000 sacks of rice to private traders, saying that it was necessary to increase the agency’s operational funds.

NFA data showed that as of 1 February, the agency had 361,396 50-kilo bags of milled rice in stock, with 193,386 bags stored for more than three months.

Number grows

A congressional probe divulged that the volume of buffer stock sold was not only 75,000 bags as initially disclosed, but it may have been twice that.

This was confirmed by Quezon Rep. Mark Enverga, chairperson of the House Committee on Agriculture and Food, in a radio interview on Friday, citing the statement of suspended NFA administrator Bioco.

The panel is probing the sale of “aging” and “deteriorating” NFA rice to traders at much lower than the prevailing price of P1,250 per bag.

There was information disclosed in the public hearing that the grains that NFA sold were re-bagged by traders and sold at a higher price.

“There are documents that point to exactly 130,000 (bags sold). However, as the inquiry went on, administrator Bioco eventually admitted that 157,000 bags were sold in total profit terms,” Enverga disclosed.

NFA officer-in-charge administrator Piolito Santos pledged to the committee that some of the sold buffer stock, which remained in the NFA warehouse, would be put on hold pending the investigation, Enverga said.

The House panel, according to Enverga, is one with the Ombudsman’s position that anomalies indeed plagued the transaction.

Ombudsman Samuel Martires meted the suspensions, which Agriculture Secretary Laurel immediately carried out on Monday.

Laurel, who has temporarily taken over as NFA head, vowed not to tolerate any corruption in the agencies under him and said a special panel of internal investigators was formed to determine the guilt of those involved.

“They cannot take a leave during the period of preventive suspension,” he said, noting that the officials involved cannot evade accountability by going on leave.

“If there are officials who are preventively suspended with prior leave, approved leave, that leave has been terminated upon the receipt of the preventive suspension,” Martires said.