No meal for most Filipinos is complete without rice for their adobo, sinigang and other viands on the dining table. Some enterprising fast food chains, even carinderias and turo-turo, offer unli rice to customers to increase their customer base.

In last Sunday’s piece, this corner, in passing, touched on the issues and concerns bugging our capability to sufficiently produce the main staple food.

Well, much has been said — which actually polarized Filipinos — about the promise made by then presidential bet and now our Chief of State, Ferdinand Marcos Jr., to make rice available at P20 per kilo.

I assume that Pres Bongbong would not have made the statement if he had no basis for making it, considering the matter involves our staple food. Unless some among the groups of people advising him were simply bootlicking to get the gentleman’s trust for whatever personal interest they had in mind.

Most of us looked forward to its realization — even up to now because each of us consumes no less than 115 kilos of rice, or about two and a half sacks, a year. About 30 percent of total food expenditure is spent on rice where 60 percent of our household income has been on a “hand to mouth existence” for decades and more. Roughly 70 percent of our incomes barely meet our health, education and other daily basic necessities based on Maslov’s physiological hierarchy of needs.

As we all know, the expectation of the masses for P20 a kilo rice remains at its height but is unrealized for reasons we will try to fathom here. Kadiwa stores under the Department of Agriculture in preselected LGU plazas sell at a little below P30 on a very limited volume compared to the daily need.

In 1974-75, we were somehow self- sufficient, but the supply-demand gap widened year by year due to a myriad of reasons. In the early ‘80s, rice prices in Thailand and the Philippines were the same but hikes began in 1986.

The Philippines’ total rice supply stands at about 18 million metric tons (MMT). Of this quantity, 90 percent is domestically produced by our farmers while the balance of more than four MMT is imported from Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, Pakistan and India.

Rank-wise, we are the world’s biggest rice importer with China next. Being an agriculture-based economy, it is embarrassing before the world that we have to import rice. With no winter, rice farming is feasible and viable having just the annual wet and dry seasons which augurs well for a better rice output, year in and year out. Sadly, however, that is not what is going on.

I had previously cited some facts that hinder our rice productivity. Perhaps, PBBM relied on or based his P20 a kilo rice pronouncement on the magic hands of DA Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel, with the support of an agency under it, the National Irrigation Administration.

It’s a huge challenge for an astute hands-on businessman, even one without a formal college degree. Laurel had been very successful running his Frabelle fishing group before taking the helm at the DA. Sec Laurel, given full power and authority by the President, may really work wonders and deliver on the administration promise of P20 a kilo rice.

Will this daunting task on the shoulders of the DA chief be handled and finally resolve the question of rice self-sufficiency? Consider that the price of palay in 2023 stood at P19.88 with a production cost of P14.98 a kilo. With that, we will tackle here the endeavor to produce our staple food at an affordable unit cost, given all the factors and concerns facing government.

Of course, Laurel is no superman to overcome any and all obstacles all by himself.

(To be continued)

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