Bumper harvest inches Philippines closer to rice self-sufficiency

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines is inching closer to its goal of achieving rice self-sufficiency.

Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said the country is 96 percent self-sufficient in rice and expects to achieve 100 percent rice self-sufficiency level by 2020.

Palay (unhusked rice) production reached 19.4 million metric tons (MT) last year from 17.8 million MT in 2016.

“This was the highest production in the history of the rice industry in the country. The production of palay is actually already above and beyond the national requirement, but we are not declaring rice sufficiency yet because there are factors to be considered,” Piñol said in a briefing on Wednesday.

The country has a national inventory of 2.7 million MT, which is good for 88 days.

About 3.1 million MT of rice are also expected in the first quarter.

This means that the Philippines has potentially 5.8 million MT in its inventory, of which 2.8 million MT will only be consumed in the first three months as per  national consumption.

“Our second quarter buffer stock will be about three million MT, good for 96 days and that is the highest volume of buffer stock in recent years,” Piñol said.

“I will stick to our 2020 rice self-sufficiency target. But even if we achieve rice self-sufficiency by 2020 we will not be able to sustain it for so long because of population growth,” Piñol said.

“The best scenario is for about five to 10 years because as population grows it will overtake our rice production because our rice farms are already limited,” he added.

To address this, the agency is now increasing its adoption of high quality seeds, intensifying farm mechanization, improving access to credit and promoting integrated crop management, among others.