Agriculture seeks P20B support fund for rice program

The Department of Agriculture is seeking at least P20 billion for its rice sufficiency program. This figure is 67 percent higher than what the government rice program is asking the national government for 2011, Agriculture Undersecretary Joel Rudinas said Wednesday. “When you account for other investments like irrigation, P12 billion will not suffice. We’re asking for even more than P20 billion, but that’s not yet final," Rudinas told reporters in an interview Wednesday. He noted that the government needs to generate more than the current areas planted to rice. “We will exercise precision targeting. Downstream economics is not advisable if we want to achieve our sufficiency targets by 21013. We will check where we could bend backwards over but we need to have something we can hold on to," said Rudinas. He explained that the rice program will have to be reviewed once again to determine the areas where the government could focus more. The Budget Department is expected to approve about P3.1 billion for the rice program next year, the same allocation the program received this year. In 2009, the approved budget was P9.1 billion. With sufficient funding, the government expects production to hit "sufficiency status" by 2013, producing as much as 21.61 million metric tons of rice. Agriculture Secretary Proseso Alcala said the government will keep supporting the rice program by increasing yield and expanding the areas planted with rice to catch up with the country’s growing population and attain self-sufficiency. According to the International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri) , the Philippines needs to expand farm production by at least 5 percent each year from now until 2015 to cope with the growing incidence of poverty and hunger in the country. Government figures showed that production for the first semester may decrease by 10.5 percent from 7.38 million MT in 2009 to 6.6 million MT due to the ill effects of El Niño in the first and second quarters of 2010. The first quarter palay output was 3.49 million MT, down 11.4 percent from 3.94 million MT a year earlier. –VVP/VS, GMANews.TV