The House of Representatives is open to the Senate amendments to Republic Act 11203, or the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), including lifting the former’s proposal to allow the National Food Authority (NFA) to import rice anew.

The Senate, which earlier expressed an aversion to allowing the NFA to import rice again, recently committed to making amending the RTL a top priority.

However, Senator Cynthia Villar, chairperson of the Senate Committee on Food and Agriculture, maintained that the NFA should not be allowed to import rice over corruption concerns.

In an interview on Tuesday, House Majority Leader Erwin Tulfo said the House leadership will give due consideration to the Senate’s proposal. He, however, emphasized that warding off potential corruption in the NFA is best left to the Department of Agriculture (DA), the NFA’s mother agency.

“Initially, in the version of Congress laid out by the House Committee on Agriculture and Food, the NFA will import, but we found out that the Senate is not receptive to that,” he said.

“So, the [House] will just agree to [their recommendation], but the committee and, of course, the leadership of the [House] will talk about it,” Tulfo said.

The neophyte lawmaker asserted that while the House has good intentions in re-empowering the NFA, it has zero tolerance for power abuse. “The only thing we can think of in Congress is for our countrymen to have access to cheap rice,” he said in the vernacular.

House leaders are keen on allowing the NFA to enter the domestic rice market by reinstating its primary functions through amendments to the RTL, in a bid to drive down the cost of rice, now selling for as much as P60 per kilo from the President’s “aspiration” price of P20/kilo.

The House leadership believes that amending the RTL would lower the cost of the staple grain by at least P10 to P15 per kilo, nearer the P30 per kilo mark.

Recently, the lower chamber passed House Bill 10381, reviving some of the NFA’s primary mandates, including its price stabilization and supply regulation, which were taken away from the agency after the RTL’s enactment in 2019.