NATIONAL Food Authority (NFA) in Bohol gears up to buy 100,000 bags of palay this cropping season, a figure thrice as much as its regular procurement program in the past years.
And while private commercial buyers are buying at about P12 per kilo, NFA gets it at a higher price, assistant manager Ma. Fe Evasco said during a radio interview over a local station.
“Wed like to inform our farmers that that the NFA is buying at P17 a kilo and we are also offering P1,800 fertilizer cash incentive for every farmer who can sell 50 bags at one time,” Evasco announced.
The P17 per kilo is the standard government support price for farmers, Evasco explained. This is even as reports last week bared that commercial buyers have started buying palay stocks at P12 a kilo.
“We have mobile procurement and stationary buying stations at our warehouses where farmers can deliver or sell their products, but unluckily, [unlike the commercial buyers,] we can not give out cash advances because it would be against government auditing rules,” she emphasized.
A farmer whose palay grains approximate 97% purity and 15% moisture content can sell it at P17 while the NFA adjusts its standard buying price if the quality is low, Evasco hinted.
This as the government even more incentives to farmers who would opt to go for certified rice and hybid and tested high yield varieties, Evasco pointed out.
Over tihap, Evasco explained that farmers who get an early cash advance from commercial buyers are at the mercy of them who now demand low buying price.
According to her, only private buyers with NFA accreditation are legally allowed to engage in rice buying. But, she also admitted there is no law banning commercial buyers from offering P12.
If commercial buyers offer prices higher than the government support price, it would be beneficial to the farmers. But below the support price, the government can be an option for farmers, she bared.
She also faulted the tihap, a crude cash advance strategy which binds farmers into selling their harvest low to the commercial buyers who earlier, lent them cash.
The situation has also alarmed Governor Erico Aumentado who directed Provincial Administrator Tomas Abapo to investigate the widespread sabotaging of palay buying prices by private rice buyers.
Atty. Abapo cited the farmers’ lack of access to capital to finance production costs and their daily sustenance that would push them to the tihap system.
This as the NFA sets up 51 more mobile palay-buying stations across the country in time for the main harvest season. The move is to give more access to farmers who sell their produce to the agency, in line with President Arroyo’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) commitments.
Sustained higher public investments in agriculture and fisheries and higher spending on the intervention measures of the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the NFA, parts of it from “Katas ng VAT” subsidy program—has enabled the government to raise national rice sufficiency.
The mobile palay-buying stations will be on top of the food agency’s 350 stations scattered across paddy-growing provinces nationwide, according to Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap.
In a report to Yap, NFA Administrator Jessup Navarro said the food agency’s current buying stations include 52 such centers in Southern Luzon, 46 in Northern Luzon, 35 in Central Luzon and 22 in Western Visayas. (rachiu/PIA)
