BONTOC, Mountain Province, Philippines - Officials and members of the Confederation of Grain Retailers (Grecon), Mountain Province chapter joined their counterparts nationwide in appealing to President Benigno S. Aquino and the members of the 15th Congress to restore the P8-billion budget of the National Food Authority (NFA) for next year.
This developed as the supposed budget of the NFA for 2011 will reportedly be transferred to the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) to fund its Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program, amounting to over P21 billion.
In its open letter, the local chapter of Grecon said cutting off the budget of the NFA would render the rice agency inutile to perform its mandate of ensuring rice security in the country.
Rice retailers in Mountain Province contend that the budget is very much needed to stabilize the supply and prices of rice, food security and palay procurement.
They said the extent of the NFA's intervention is usually the barometer in fixing the rice prices in the market and palay farm gate prices during harvest.
They also fear that the government promise of eliminating middlemen in the marketing of the farm produce and the three-year rice self-sufficiency goal would only come to naught if there are no enough government marketing support for the farmers, especially that the budget for the agency has been scrapped and eventually given to another agency as dole out.
With the reported constricting of rice supply in the world market, the grains retailers said it would be more imperative for the government to provide support to the farmers to encourage them to produce more.
The grains retailers maintained that the Philippines which has 38 percent of the population who consider themselves as poor based on a recent SWS survey, should continue subsidizing the prices of rice sold by the food agency.
Mt. Province, a highly rice deficit province which depends on the NFA of its about 30 percent rice consumption will be most affected if the government rice agency will not be provided its much needed budget, an NFA employee said.
With the scrapping of the NFA's budget, rice prices will surely hit skyrocketing levels which will be unaffordable to most poor families which will eventually render the government's conditional cash transfer useless considering that the amount will simply go to the purchase of rice with high prices just to sustain their living
