NFA continues buying more palay

MANILA, Philippines — The National Food Authority (NFA) maintained that it has never stopped buying palay (unhusked rice) from local farmers.

NFA administrator Judy Dansal said NFA’s procurement operations is a year-round activity and that the grains agency is ready to receive palay deliveries from farmers across the country.

“This early, NFA is already preparing for aggressive palay buying starting October, although we continue to entertain farmers selling their stocks from sporadic harvests in between the summer and main cropping seasons,” she said.

NFA’s current stock is about eight million bags of rice, including the four million bags of  imported rice, 400,000 bags of local rice and 6.3 million bags of palay for milling.

Dansal said the volume stock is good for 13 days of national daily consumption requirement which means that NFA is compliant with the provisions of the rice tariffication law.

The rice tariffication law passed early this year requires NFA to maintain a 15 to 30 day buffer stock of rice based on the daily consumption requirement of 651,860 bags.

“With these data, it is impossible for NFA to stop buying palay as we haven’t even reached yet the maximum volume of buffer stock required of us to maintain on a regular basis,” she said.

For January to August, NFA had bought 5.9 million bags of palay, exceeding its target of 5.3 million. The total volume is also 41 percent of the agency’s 14.46 million bags target for the whole year.

Based on the country’s palay harvest calendar, 30 percent of total annual production comes from the summer harvest between March and May while 70 percent comes from the main harvest from October to December.

“Even during the lean months period, NFA is still able to buy palay because more farmers are selling to the agency to take advantage of its higher buying price and incentives,” Dansal said.

NFA currently buys palay at P17 per kilogram support price plus P3 per kilo buffer stocking incentive.

This brings NFA’s maximum buying price for clean and dry palay to P20.70 per kilo for farmer cooperatives and P20.40 per kilo for individual farmers.