AN agricultural policy paper released last week by one of the country's oldest rural development NGOs lays the blame for the Philippines' dubious distinction as the world's largest rice importer on decades of neglect and bad policy that has pushed food security in the country to the brink of complete collapse. We have to agree with the paper's assessment of the situation, and it does offer some good solutions to rectify the dire situation, but is anyone in a position of authority to implement change even listening?
The paper, entitled "Philippines is a rice-deficit country: The challenges, policy innovations, and strategic interventions," was written by experts from the Integrated Rural Development Foundation (IRDF), a rural development non-governmental organization founded in 1989. The paper links the massive amount of rice imports — 4.7 million metric tons last year, the highest amount of rice imported by any country on earth — to problematic policies such as the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL); Executive Order 62 which further reduced the tariff on imported rice from 35 percent to 15 percent; inadequate and inconsistent economic and technical support for farmers; and the unchecked conversion of agricultural land, causing the loss of more than half a million hectares of farmland in the past three decades.
The 2019 Rice Tariffication Law (RTL) is targeted as one of the key causes of the collapse of agricultural sector incomes, tagged at a combined P145 billion in 2024 alone, affecting more than 1.5 million rice farmers and mill workers. To add insult to injury, the RTL utterly failed to meet its stated objective to reduce consumer prices, so that the entire rice economy has been destabilized.
This might have been avoided, or at least moderated, if rampant conversion of agricultural land for residential and commercial development had not been carried on for decades — and still continues — thanks to the faulty 1991 Local Government Code and Congress' stubborn refusal to pass a National Land Use Act. This has resulted in the loss of about 520,000 hectares of farmland, which the IRDF report translates to a loss of 3.3 million metric tons of milled rice annually. That exact figure of potential supply losses may be debatable, as it takes a rather optimistic view of Philippine rice farms' productivity, but even if it is an overestimate, the loss is still too substantial to ignore.
Mulcting middlemen
And of course, as any critical discussion of rice supply must, the report highlights the destructive influence of traders who continue to engage in hoarding, price manipulation and predatory lending to farmers. Ridding the agricultural supply chain of mulcting middlemen has been a campaign vow of government officials at every level for so long that it has become a cliché, but it is in fact a real problem.
The IRDF paper offers a number of solutions to improve the current situation and head off an even bigger food crisis in the future. Rolling back the import liberalization applied to rice, since it has not worked for either the supply or demand side, is an obvious fix, as is compelling Congress to pass the Land Use Act. The paper proposes replacing the RTL with the Rice Industry Sustainable Development Act, which is a sound suggestion.
Other recommendations made by the IRDF paper are a bit more problematic, particularly its "non-negotiable" demand for a legally mandated minimum support price of P25 per kilogram for palay (unmilled rice). Production costs are currently pegged at P17 to P18 per kg, so the wholesale price suggestion makes sense on one level, but subsidies are a potential trap, particularly when there are no suggestions about how to improve productivity and lower production costs.
The most frustrating thing about reading the IRDF report is that it highlights fundamental problems with the rice supply chain that have existed for years and been given no more than lip service by the country's leadership, or worse, been subjected to poorly conceived and politically motivated "solutions" that cause more problems than they solve. Real solutions do exist, and others can be developed, if only the government would listen and commit itself to actually correcting the worsening situation, instead of looking for quick fixes that will look good during the next election campaign.
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