Sen Loren Lagarda

Legarda was one of the guests during the annual convention of the National Association of Public Secondary School Heads (NAPSSHE) at the Teachers Camp.

The senator said studies show that the country’s rice wastage annually is over 15 percent of total consumption while the national government imports 10 percent. The senator said the wastage is brought about by the lack of appropriate post-harvest facilities.

If the national government could reduce the wastage by providing appropriate post-harvest facilities for the farmers, Legarda said, the country would no longer need to import rice. It could utilize the funds earmarked for importation to other meaningful projects for the benefit of poor Filipinos.

With the country now experiencing a food crisis, she said, concerned government agencies must start re-focusing their programs and projects to boost the production of rice and other basic commodities, particularly the installation of more post-harvest facilities. 

Legarda called for the provision of capital and appropriate equipment to the farmers. At the same time, she underscored the importance of rehabilitating and constructing more irrigation facilities and farm-to-market roads.

Legarda supported a move for a total ban on the conversion of agricultural lands to other purposes.

The chairman of the Senate committee on economic affairs assailed the inability of concerned government agencies to maximize the utilization of available resources to enhance food production, citing that Thailand and Vietnam who learned from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) based in the Philippines have become giant rice producers and have overshadowed the country where they learned rice production techniques.

DA installing 1,000 flatbed rice dryers in 37 provinces

The Department of Agriculture (DA) has installed over 500 of the 1,000 flatbed dryers that the DA is setting up in 37 rice-producing provinces in the country this year, in line with the long-term government goal to guarantee stable rice supply and prices.

In its report to DA Secretary Arthur Yap, the Bureau of Post-harvest Research and Extension (BPRE) said that as of May 5, it had already installed 53 flatbed dryers in Nueva Ecija, one of Luzon’s largest rice-production areas.

Ten flatbed dryers were also installed as of last month in Iloilo; six each in Bulacan, Bohol, and Leyte; five each in Zamboanga del Sur, South Cotabato, and Agusan del Sur; four each in Davao del Sur, Kalinga, and Pampanga; three in Pangasinan; two in Camarines Sur, and one each in Tarlac, Occidental Mindoro, and Isabela, according to BPRE Director Ricardo Cachuela.

Cachuela said the BPRE is fast-tracking this project, which it is implementing in Irrigators’ Associations (IA) sites in cooperation with the National Irrigation Administration (NIA), the National Food Authority (NFA), and the National Agribusiness Corp. (Nabcor).

Secretary Yap said this post-harvest support for rice clusters nationwide will be complemented by continuing subsidies for seeds and inputs, disease prevention measures, and the repair and rehabilitation of irrigation facilities in unusable lands to help attain the goal of producing an all-time high of 17.24 million metric tons (MT) of rice this year and even higher yields in 2009 and onwards.

The DA is carrying out a twin-pronged approach to guarantee stable stocks and prices of rice in the short and long terms, which involves sustaining higher palay production in the years to come and, in the meantime, securing imports while local production is yet inadequate.

Palay production reached a record 16.24 million MT in 2007 despite a dry spell, and is expected to hit an even higher yield of 17.32 million MT this year. This year’s production target is expected to be attained by the DA, as the summer harvests alone, according to the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS), are expected to reach 7.1 million MT, which is higher than the 6.8-million-ton output during the same April-June period in 2007.

As of May 5, DA officials in the field reported that rice producing regions have so far harvested 5.893 million metric tons of palay in 77 percent of the total areas planted.

The DA said it will expand areas planted to palay during the main or wet planting season this year to 2.54 million hectares, with some 92,000 hectares in included in its Quick Turnaround (QTA) program, which involves the insertion of a third-cropping season in between the summer and wet cropping seasons.

Yap directed the Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM) to provide him an update on Strategic Agricultural and Fisheries Development Zones (SAFDZs) suitable for palay production "so that both the government and the private sector can intervene in a focused manner to convert these into rice production sites."

For the dry season of 2009, Yap said the DA will target at least 1.8 million hectares of land for planting with hybrid and certified rice seeds. (Marvin N. Benaning)