NFA Rationalization Plan irrelevant?

The National Food Authority (NFA) is our country’s premier food agency tasked to ensure food security of Filipinos. How will NFA address the nation’s food security problem if it deprives the food security of its own employees?

The NFA Rationalization Plan or the implementation of Executive Order No. 366 will render the agency irrelevant and inutile. The Plan utterly disregards many important provisions of the NFA Charter and substantially altered the NFA’s policy goals and objectives.

The Plan does not in any way address the so-called “financial losses or hemorrhaging” of NFA. Records prove these losses are attributed to 50 percent illegal tariff imposed on rice importation, cost of rice importation and programs and projects of Malacañang being undertaken by the agency without corresponding budget. The Plan “saves” only a mere 2.3 percent on its administrative expense.

The Plan is not only a precursor for the eventual separation of the NFA’s proprietary and regulatory functions (decoupling) but a scheme for the eventual privatization of the supply and price control of rice. In short, the staple food will be left to the mercy of unscrupulous rice traders and businessmen.

The Plan contradicts PGMA’s marching order to fully support our domestic farmers through massive procurement of locally produced palay instead of rice importation. It is an anti-thesis of Rice-Self Sufficiency, Self Reliance and Independence on the Staple Food. PGMA’s pronouncement of “Food in Every Table” remains to be an empty political rhetoric because of The Plan.

Worse, the Plan will unjustly terminate about 800 rank-and-file employees, most of them breadwinning laborers and rank-and-file employees with subsistence salaries. The Plan is so callous that it is being implemented in this Yuletide season of benevolence amid an impending economic recession at the household level.

If The Plan pushes through, what will happen to NFA’s avowed mandate, as being “conscious of its social responsibilities and capable of providing adequate and continuous food supply to the nation and of contributing its proper share to the national economy?” — ROMAN M. SANCHEZ, National President, NFA Employees Association