Amid criticisms of an oversupply of rice due to excessive importation, Senator Loren Legarda on Thursday called for the complete restructuring of the National Food Authority (NFA).
Legarda said she wants to split the NFA into the National Food Corporation (NFC) and the Food Development and Regulatory Administration (FDRA) so that its proprietary and regulatory functions would be dealt with separately.
"(My) bill addresses this conflict of interest by creating two separate agencies and decoupling the regulatory from the propriety function," she said.
Legarda said that the NFC would be mandated to maintain a "small strategic reserve" for emergency purposes based on certain parameters to be established by the FDRA.
"Maybe that restructuring of the NFA will solve this problem of oversupply and over-importation," she said during a weekly forum at the Senate on Thursday.
The senator issued the statement after President Benigno Aquino III revealed in his first State of the Nation Address that rice stocks were rotting in government warehouses due to over-importation.
The Philippine government has asked Vietnamese trader Vina Foods to stop shipments involving 200,000 metric tons of rice because NFA warehouses are full of the commodity.
Under her proposal, however, Legarda said it would be difficult to justify the same NFA import and storage decisions which necessitated subsidies that "drained" the government's fiscal resources.
Subsidized NFA rice for poor families is sold at P25 per kilo. In "poorest areas," it is sold at P18.25 per kilo.
The NFA was created on September 26, 1972 through Presidential Decree No. 4. It was initially called the National Grains Authority, which was responsible for integrating the growth and development of the grains industry.
On January 14, 1981, through PD No. 1770, the NGA became the NFA. The decree widened the agency’s commodity coverage to include food items like raw or fresh fruits and vegetables and fish and marine, manufactured, processed, or packaged food products.—Kimberly Jane T. Tan/JV
