Minimizing post-harvest losses key to RP rice security - Loren

Senator Loren Legarda urged today the government to help farmers gain access to modern milling and drying equipment to minimize their post-harvest losses and increase their incomes.

Loren said that with farmers complaining that the country's milling and drying technologies are already outdated, the government must help farmers' cooperatives procure the much-needed post-harvest equipment.

"It's been said that at 10 percent, the post-harvest losses of Filipino farmers, if minimized can cover our total rice importation each year," said Loren, chair of the Senate committees on agriculture and food.

"What this means is that we can have 100 percent rice sufficiency if only we cut post-harvest losses, considering that we import around 10 percent of our rice needs each year," she said.

The senator noted the statement of Herculano Co, president of the Philippine Confederation of Grains Associations, that the total annual import volume of the country is roughly equivalent to the post harvest losses in the country "which uses 70-year-old milling equipment."

Loren also expressed concern over a Department of Agriculture (DA) projection that the country would need to import 1.8 million metric tons of the staple during the last quarter of the year.

Nonetheless, Loren said that any importation that would be done by the DA should intended to cover the projected reduction in palay harvest due to less intensive use of fertilizers.

"Here comes again the ghost of the fertilizer fund scam haunting us. Our farmers are complaining of not having enough fertilizers when funds had been allotted for it in the past," she said.

The problem with any new fertilizer funding allocation, Loren explained, is that it will always be under a cloud of suspicion with what happened in 2004.

"But rice importation should only be resorted to unless really necessary because any oversupply of rice due to importation will hit local rice farmers hard," Loren said.

She asked the DA to study the proposal of rice farmers for the National Food Authority (NFA) to buy direct from local farmers at very competitive farm-gate prices.

A farm-gate price of P16 per kilo of palay translates to a market price of P32 per kilo of rice.

"The middlemen are the ones making money, buying cheap from our farmers and selling high at end consumers," she said.

"If government buys direct from farmers at fair-trade prices, our farmers would earn more and have the funds to buy good seeds and the needed fertilizers," Loren said.