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By Ira Karen Apanay Senior
Reporter
The National Food Authority (NFA)
on Tuesday was directed to maintain
the P17 per kilo buying rate for palay (unhusked rice) for the rest
of the year to encourage farmers to grow more of it. Initial
harvests during this dry season have been encouraging, according to
field reports.
At the United Nations, Secretary-
General Ban Ki Moon announced he was forming a UN task force on the
food crisis also on Tuesday, bringing together heads of UN agencies
to provide a coordinated response on the issue.
“The NFA will maintain this
support price for [palay for] the rest of the year in keeping with
the Arroyo government’s goal of not only boosting farm
productivity but of making farming much more profitable as well,
especially for its small stakeholders,” Agriculture Secretary
Arthur Yap said.
President Gloria Arroyo earlier
ordered the food agency to increase its support price to P17 a kilo,
which is almost half over the previous support price of P12, only
for this summer harvest season.
The Agriculture department’s
Rice Action Center headed by Undersecretary Jesus Emmanuel Paras
reported to Yap that as of April 15, harvesting for the dry season
has been done in about 65 percent of the areas planted totaling 1.87
million hectares, with production reaching 4.9 million metric tons
from all over the country. The season’s harvests are expected to
last until June.
Paras said farmers in four
provinces in Cagayan Valley— Cagayan, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya and
Quirino —have harvested more than half or 66 percent of areas
planted to palay totaling 288,330 hectares, with production reaching
890,780 metric tons.
Central Luzon, where farmers
already harvested 47 percent of palay fields, followed with the next
highest yield. Production in the region totaled 638,289 metric tons
with an average yield of 4.9 metric tons per hectare from a total
area harvested amounting to 129,450 hectares, he added.
Agriculture officials noted that
the initial field reports show that rice supply will remain
sufficient in the months ahead, as a total of 7.1 million metric
tons of palay is expected to be harvested during this dry cropping
season.
The Agriculture department
production target for this dry cropping season appears on track as
the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics projected palay harvests to
have reached 6.1 million metric tons by this time, or 87 percent of
the forecasted output of 7 million metric tons.
Moreover, officials also
expect the arrival by June of the balance of the 700,000 metric tons
of rice imports earlier contracted by the National Food Authority,
or just in time for the traditional lean months of July to
September, which come before the main or wet cropping season.
Paras also reported to Yap
that the Ilocos provinces of Pangasinan, La Union, Ilocos Sur, and
Ilocos Norte harvested 78 percent of palay from 72,612 hectares,
with production at 277, 487 metric tons, representing the
third-highest yield so far and a per-hectare average of 4.9 metric
tons.
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