Govt urged: Allot more land for rice

MANILA, Philippines – Senators Edgardo Angara and Loren Legarda called on the government yesterday to immediately put to use one million hectares of idle and barely used lands for agriculture, specifically to augment areas for rice production.

Isabela Gov. Grace Padaca, for her part, has given assurance there is more than enough stock of rice in her province, the country’s biggest rice producer, to augment the requirements of other provinces amid reports of a shortage of the country’s major staple.

Angara, chairman of the Senate committee on agriculture, said the Department of Agriculture (DA) during his term as agriculture secretary had identified the additional lands that could be put to productive use.

He said mobilizing these idle lands for agricultural production would not be expensive and would be worth the cost of development.

He noted the country’s agricultural areas, including prime rice lands, have been shrinking at an alarming pace, leading to a recent proposal to impose a ban on the conversion of agricultural lands into subdivisions and other uses.

Angara expressed full support for such an initiative.

The Philippines has a solid and modern rice production culture and the provision of enough lands for rice production will solve the minor
supply problem, he said.

He said the country can no longer rely on imported rice to boost local supply as the global need is tight and rice prices have been surging on the international market.

“We have to produce our own needs,” Angara said.

Legarda, for her part, said there must be more arable lands in the Philippines to be planted with palay to fully meet the rice needs of Filipinos without resorting to importation.

She issued the statement in reaction to the observation made by Robert Zeigler, president of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), that “there are just not enough lands” in the Philippines to plant palay.

“We had more than enough farmlands before many of them were turned into residential communities, golf courses, malls and the like,” said Legarda, who took note of IRRI’s claim that the Philippines even had higher rice yields per hectare than the world’s top rice exporter, Thailand.

Legarda said annual subsidies were not sustainable because of the very big gap between international and local prices of the staple, adding that the problem was aggravated by opportunistic diversions of supply and hoarding.

She warned that the Arroyo administration might face a politically explosive situation if the spiraling prices and shortage of rice would worsen.

While Filipinos are also reeling from the high prices of oil products like gasoline, diesel and LPG, she said the government could ask Filipinos to limit their use of fuel products but not cut down on their rice consumption.

Legarda pointed out that a more aggressive irrigation and farm-support program is needed if the Philippines is to achieve 100 percent rice sufficiency from local production.

While the government reported a 5.96 percent increase in total rice production in 2007 to reach 16.24 million metric tons (MT), the output could have been better if not for the adverse impact of climate change during the second and third quarters of last year.

She said the government must aggressively pursue global warming mitigation activities, especially against drought.

Total land area planted to rice in the Philippines was estimated at four million hectares, excluding upland areas planted to rice. Of the total, only about 70 percent is irrigated and the rest is rain-fed.

Isabela could save the day

But Padaca, citing Isabela’s role as very crucial to the stability of the country’s rice supply being the top producer in terms of production per hectare, said her province could have the solution to the tight situation.

Belying reports that Isabela has been suffering a decline in rice yield, Padaca said rice production in her province even surpassed its output of the same period last year.

The reported decline in Isabela’s production fuelled fears of a looming shortage of rice in the country, especially since the province contributes at least 40 percent of the country’s rice needs.

Provincial agriculturist Danilo Tumamao confirmed the governor’s declaration, saying that so far the province has been experiencing better rice yield this season compared to last year.

“As far as Isabela is concerned, our production (so far) is stable. We are even expecting a 10 percent increase in rice production compared to last year,” he said.

He said Isabela has become the leading supplier of rice to areas needing additional supply as the province has more than enough for its domestic requirements.

This affirmed President Arroyo’s statement last Monday during her visit to neighboring Nueva Vizcaya that Cagayan Valley, where Isabela is situated, already produced more than enough for the country’s rice needs this time of the year.

Citing statistics from the National Food Authority (NFA), Mrs. Arroyo said that for the first quarter of this year alone, the region already produced 1.8 million MT of rice compared to only 2.7 million MT for the whole of last year.

Hoarders at work

The reported rice shortage in the country is exacerbated by reports that some big-time rice traders were hoarding rice, causing the unusual increase in prices.

Criminal Investigation and Detection Group operatives are looking into reports that some NFA-accredited rice traders in Isabela are repacking NFA rice into commercial sacks to double the price in local markets.

Such reports also prompted Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap to relieve NFA Cagayan Valley director Danilo Pastrana and NFA Isabela provincial manager Alfredo Paguila the other day. 

For his part, Vice President Noli de Castro insisted that instead of mere relief or suspension, NFA officials linked to or whose areas of jurisdiction have been found to be engaged in rice hoarding and price manipulation or are in cahoots with private traders in the repacking and reselling of NFA rice at a higher price should be immediately dismissed.

“If I were asked about this, I wouldn’t just suspend them. I’d have them automatically dismissed from the service,” said De Castro.

Malls for rice

Meanwhile, Butil party-list Rep. Leonila Chavez said the housing and industrial boom, which sparked the conversion of prime agricultural lands into subdivisions and factories, has taken its toll on the country’s production capabilities, triggering the current rice crisis.

She said the national government should now put a stop to the conversion of irrigated farmlands into subdivisions and factory sites.

Chavez observed that the country is better at producing rice than most Asian countries but the indiscriminate conversion of agricultural lands into other uses has negated this distinct advantage.

She said land conversion has wiped out the country’s roughly two million hectares of fully irrigated rice production because these are being converted into areas for housing and factories, for commercial and industrial uses.

She noted too that Thailand has seven million hectares of fully irrigated farmlands devoted to rice production while Vietnam has more than five million hectares of irrigated rice producing areas.

“This conversion is most pronounced in Central Luzon, once dubbed as the country’s rice granary, ironically President Arroyo’s home region,” she said.

She added that shopping malls and housing developments are going on at a rapid pace in former rice fields in the region, with major developers now engaged in massive “land banking” for their subdivision sites.

“Prime agricultural areas are being snapped up by the leading developers for malls and high-end housing sites. It is tragic. Jungles of concrete are now standing on what used to be vast stretches of green and gold,” said Chavez, who hails from the region.

Chavez had earlier proposed the implementation of a crash rice production program patterned after the Green Revolution to enable the country to produce 20 million MT a year, which she said is enough to supply domestic needs and provide for a buffer stock.

She said the government’s rice importation policy is flawed because it is costly and is merely a palliative.

She suggested that the government should resort to provision of agricultural credit, irrigation and hybrid seeds and extension support to optimize the yield in the remaining two million hectares of prime rice lands which can be used to produce three crops a year, at 200 to 250 cavans of palay per hectare.

“I think this can be done. Farmers in Nueva Ecija, for example, can routinely produce 250 cavans per hectare per cropping season because of superior inputs, adequate irrigation and technology,” she added. – With reports from Charlie Lagasca, Dino Balabo and Manny Galvez