THE National Food Authority’s (NFA) decision to procure palay (unmilled rice) only from registered farmers addresses the longstanding problem of ineligible sellers receiving the government support price, industry officials said Sunday.
“We welcome the cleansing being done by the current NFA leadership in ensuring that only legitimate farmers get subsidies and support from government,” Jayson H. Cainglet, spokesman of the Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura, said via Viber.
“That had been a decades-long problem plaguing the NFA.”
The bigger concern remains the capacity of NFA to intervene in the market effectively, he said.
The grains agency may have exceeded its target procurement but its procurement volume is less than 5% of the palay harvest, he noted.
The NFA offers a palay buying price typically more favorable to farmers than that on the open market, preventing farmers from being totally at the mercy of commercial rice dealers. The constraints, however, are the NFA’s procurement budget and limited storage capacity.
Under the new rules, only verified farmers listed on the government’s official registry RSBSA (Registry System for the Basic Sectors in Agriculture) or those who can show a certificate from their local government can sell palay to the NFA.
Each NFA branch must submit a monthly list of those who sold it palay and how much, for prominent display at the branch.
With farmer consent, branches can also share the purchase data on NFA social media, subject to privacy regulations.
Each NFA warehouse has been tasked with maintaining a table from where farmers’ groups can observe the buying process.
Former Agriculture Undersecretary Fermin D. Adriano noted that there had been allegations that the NFA has been buying from trader-consolidators and their allied cooperatives in Ilocos, Cagayan, and Central Luzon.
“This limits the palay support price offered by NFA to a few beneficiaries,” he said via Viber, calling the NFA’s latest move a “good initiative.”
“The challenge will be how extensive the buying will be given NFA’s relatively limited budget for this purpose,” he said.
“What percentage of the total palay harvest will it be able to buy from small farmers?”
Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) National Director Raul Q. Montemayor said the list of sellers must be posted on a real time basis, and if possible, available for viewing online, so that legitimate farmers in the area can challenge dubious transactions.
“The NFA should also do random validation of sales with members/officers of farmer groups since in most of the illegal transactions where farmer groups are used as dummies, only a few officers of the organization are involved and in the know,” he said via Viber.
The FFF also welcomed NFA’s stricter procurement rules, noting the problem of NFA employees colluding with traders and their dummies.
The NFA can buy only from farmers or farmer organizations, but some traders have enlisted some farmers and leaders of farmers’ groups to pay a commission to tap the traders’ sales pipeline to the NFA, it noted.
“This has been a perennial problem every time. Trader buying prices are significantly lower than NFA’s price,” it said.
The NFA buys palay for up to P30 per kilogram (kg), depending on location and moisture content of the grain.
The average farmgate price of palay fell 28.9% year-on-year in May to P17.75 per kg.
Month-on-month, the palay farmgate price fell 1.6% in May from P18.04 in April, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority. — Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza