In ‘Rice as Destiny’, national artist F. Sionil Jose wrote ‘..children … are also warned never to leave a morsel of rice on their plates for it is not only wasteful, it also shows disrespect.’ On this note, The STAR’s news item of ‘rotting’ 10,000 metric tons (mt) is shocking! (NFA asked to explain rotting rice, 4/27/2011). Ten million kilos entitle the nation to more than two servings of cooked rice over lunch, based on the Bureau of Agriculture Statistics (BAS) 2009 national survey of rice consumption of 30,300 mt a day. Moreover, more than a quarter of a billion pesos of the public’s money was earmarked to pay for ‘aging’ imports that arrived in Western Visayas in February-March 2010. And there are a dozen more designated NFA ports of unloading!
The ‘rotting’ rice validates reports that the NFA once again was on a buying spree for 2010, as in 2008. Acting on a cue after Typhoon Ondoy from the national leadership that ‘food imports need to be organized as soon as possible’, (BBC News), the NFA/DA contracted over a period of two weeks in December 2009, some 2.5 million mt of rice (not food) from foreign sources, the biggest on record. Shipment was irresponsibly scheduled over 10 months, even overlapping with domestic September-December 2010 main harvest season, leaving no NFA storage space left, and some $36 million worth of imports were reset for 2011 shipment. Our preference for newly harvested rice, was a factor that raised stock levels by end 2010 to have reached 3.424 million mt, or twice prior years’ level. The USDA-FAS Grains Report for the country also attributed the record inventories to ‘over purchasing in MY 09/10’.
Indeed nothing had changed on the NFA’s bulging stocks of unsold, aging, infested rice and rice sweepings. In early 2009, the Commission on Audit (COA) reported some 100 million kilos (2 million bags) of an unsaleable imported rice grade worth P3.3 billion that had aged and lost its value over time in various warehouses in the National Capital Region. What a contradiction in that after Typhoon Ketsana, the UN had to jumpstart for Filipino flood victims with $7 million, a fund for $74 million.
In lieu of futile and wasteful efforts to hold public officials accountable for the wasteful use of public funds, let us focus on the reduction of wasteful rice consumption on the table, which translates to about six percent of national palay production. Most Filipinos “are never really detached from rice…”.—