CITY OF SAN FERNANDO, Pampanga — If the price of palay keeps dropping, many Filipino rice farmers might simply give up on planting altogether.
This was the warning issued by Engr. Rosendo So, chairman of the Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura (SINAG), as farmgate prices for palay have plunged to as low as P8 per kilo in parts of Central and Northern Luzon — a price point that’s pushing farmers deeper into debt.
“At those prices, farmers aren’t just losing profit — they can’t even recover what they spent for planting,” So said.
In Mangaldan, Pangasinan, farmers say they’re losing about P10,000 per hectare this harvest season. Still, some have no choice but to sell their harvested palay at a loss, rather than let it spoil in storage — or worse, rot in the fields.
Across Regions 1, 2, and 3, farmgate prices have crashed to P8 to P10 per kilo, a far cry from the P15 to P17 per kilo that farmers used to get. In towns like San Miguel in Bulacan and Cabiao in Nueva Ecija, the trend is the same — palay prices down, production costs still stuck at P15 per kilo.
Even in San Antonio, Nueva Ecija — a major rice-producing town — the price has slipped to P10 to P12, compared to P17 to P19 just a few months ago.
One of the culprits, according to So, is the influx of cheap rice from Vietnam, which local traders now use as the pricing benchmark when buying palay from Filipino farmers.
Ironically, rice bran or darak, a byproduct of rice milling, now commands a higher price — P24 per kilo — than the palay itself.
The National Food Authority (NFA) is still buying clean, dry palay at P24 per kilo, but farmers say the agency can’t absorb more volume due to limited storage and slow processing times.
In frustration, some farmers from Nueva Ecija are calling on the government for help. If palay prices won’t go up anytime soon, they say the least the government could do is provide free fertilizers, pesticides and fuel to keep them afloat.
To protect local rice producers, SINAG is also urging the government to restore the 35 percent tariff on imported rice — up from the current 1 percent — to stop the bleeding in the country’s rice industry.
“If this continues, we might lose more than just money. We could lose a generation of farmers,” So warned.