NFA to turn over rice importation to private sector

MANILA, Philippines - The administration will transfer to the private sector from the National Food Authority (NFA) the task of importing rice.

Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima said the move is among the reforms to be put in place to help address the money-losing operations of the state-owned agency.

“The other reform in NFA is we’ll use the private sector to be the one to import rather than the NFA doing the bulk of it,” he said.

“We will minimize NFA’s own importations unlike next year when it was government buying.”

The government has been looking for ways to reform the NFA as the agency has incurred debts amounting to P171 billion as of end-2009 from only roughly P43 billion in 2003.

Purisima said an interagency committee is still threshing out how the reforms would be implemented, including the transfer of the authority to import to the private sector.

“The NFA will have to work out its implementation program which is to increase productivity, to revisit the supply chain from the source of the seeds, the quality of the seeds, the ability of the farmers to acquire the seeds, availability and financing and then we will increase the budget on irrigation,” he said.

Purisima said intervention is also needed on better drying facilities and storage facilities for rice.

“We have 4 million hectares approximately of rice with the production of approximately 60 million tons of palay and (we) need 70.3 million tons,” he said.

“And if you look at wastage from drying and storage, it’s approximately 15 percent.”

The reforms are part of a three-year program for NFA with the objective that the government would achieve full food security in terms of rice by 2013.