MANILA — The government is in the process of forming an inter-agency executive committee that would look into the operations of the National Food Authority (NFA), Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol disclosed in a media conference on Thursday.
“It will be NFA Council’s clearinghouse,” Piñol said.
The agriculture chief said the planned executive committee would scrutinize proposed policies and other matters for the approval of the NFA Council, the food agency’s policy-making body.
If pushed through, the executive committee would be made up of Office of the President, Department of Finance, DA, and the rice-strapped NFA.
The execom’s formation might be formalized through the issuance of an executive order this year, Piñol said.
“Details of the execom are being finalized,” he said.
Piñol is optimistic the execom’s formation will help improve NFA’s performance.
Created in 1972 as the National Grains Authority, NFA is the government agency tasked with providing adequate supply of affordable rice and corn while ensuring reasonable return rates for Filipino farmers.
Piñol had earlier confirmed the return of NFA, Philippine Coconut Authority, and the Fertilizer and Pesticide Authority to the DA’s supervision, as ordered by President Rodrigo Duterte.
Despite this, however, the Agriculture Secretary said he would refrain from being involved in NFA’s rice importation activities to avoid suspicions of favoring some of
his friends, who are in the business of bringing rice into the country.
“I’ll instead designate my alternate, who will attend to NFA importation matters in the execom,” he said.
Earlier, NFA reported experiencing dwindling rice stocks due to its inability to buy rice from local farmers at PHP17 per kilogram, a price lower than what private traders are offering them.
Inability to import rice on time had also contributed to such stocks’ dip, the NFA said.
Piñol said the DA would help the NFA procure rice in areas, where the staple generally sells at lower prices.
He gave such assurance, noting Malacañang wants the NFA’s rice buffer stocks to be good for 60 days.
Before this new buffer target, the NFA had to keep a buffer stock good for 15 days at any given time and 30 days during the lean July-September season to make sure low-cost rice is available nationwide.
Regular milled NFA rice costs PHP27 per kilogram, while well-milled NFA rice costs PHP32 per kilo. These are much cheaper than commercial rice sold in the market. (Catherine Teves/PNA)
