FOLLOWING President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr.’s recent assertion that the country will enjoy strong supply of rice up to early next year thanks to the efforts and abundant harvest of Filipino farmers, the Department of Agriculture (DA) gave assurances the national rice stock inventory is at a “comfortable” level.
“With our (rice) inventory plus imports, going into the first quarter of next year our supply of rice nationwide will be ample,” DA Assistant Secretary Arnel de Mesa said in a forum.
With the palay production this October, which is the peak of the harvest during the wet season, De Mesa said they expect 77 days of national rice stock inventory this month.
This could increase to 94 days once the wet season harvest ends in November, he said.
“This does not even include the additional imports from September and the end of the third quarter which reached 271,000 metric tons,” De Mesa added.
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“Overall, until the end of the third quarter it is at 2.4 million metric tons. This is 600,000 metric tons lower than three million metric tons of the same period last year,” he said.
The DA official expressed confidence the country’s inflation rate will dip after spiking to 6.1 percent in September from the 5.3 percent listed in August.
“We believe the price of rice will affect it. If we look at it, food inflation contributed to it,” he said. “And our estimation is that the effect of Executive Order No. 39 was slowly being felt towards the last week of September.”
De Mesa said that they saw a low level of compliance among rice retailers in the initial week of the implementation of EO 39, which set a price ceiling for regular and well-milled rice. He said compliance started to pick up in the third and last week of September, reaching 87 percent.
A lot of retailers were selling rice even lower than P41 and P45 a kilo, as it coincided with the start of the wet season harvest that started in the last week of August, the official said. With the entry of September and the peak October-November harvest, there will be more supply, he added.
“So, we can expect stability in the prices of rice and we can also expect that prices will further reduce in some areas,” he said.
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