DA weeds out unqualified RCEF beneficiaries

Agriculture Secretary William Dar urged qualified farmers to enlist in the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture (RSBSA) to avail of government assistance and benefits under the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF).

The RSBSA, an inter-agency project, is a nationwide registry of baseline information of farmers, farm laborers, and fisher folk from identified provinces. The Department of Agriculture (DA) will use the RSBSA database to identify farmer-beneficiaries of the RCEF program.

Dar wants to filter out unqualified individuals and organizations from the current RSBSA list and pave the way for the successful implementation of the P10-billion-per-year program under RCEF.

“RSBSA is continuously being updated. It’s being used while (we are) culling (the list of unnecessary entries) and bringing in (legitimate) ones,” Dar said in a recent press conference in Quezon City.