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By Efren L. Danao Senior
Reporter
Here’s a warning to authors of
Senate bills—their proposed laws might get thrown out by a
committee chairman if they do not defend their bills in a public
hearing.
Sen. Richard Gordon, the chairman
of the Senate Committee on Government Corporations, expressed
disappointment on Tuesday over the absence of Senators Loren Legarda
and Ramon Revilla Jr. during the hearing on their bills reorganizing
the National Food Authority.
The bills of Legarda and Revilla
proposed that the food authority give up its trading functions to
the private sector and concentrate instead on the maintenance of the
required buffer stock for rice and corn.
“They could have defended their
bills better if they are here,” Gordon said when the invited
resource persons failed to give satisfactory answer to his questions
on the measures.
Based on the answers that he got,
he added that would not be very enthusiastic in reporting out the
bills.
Gordon noted that similar bills
had been filed in the Twelfth Congress and then filed again in the
Thirteenth and Fourteenth Congresses without any updating.
“This is now passé. There have
been many developments in rice production and rice trading. We might
be pursuing more rice importation when there would be no more rice
to import,” he said.
Ludovico Jarina, the deputy
administrator of the food agency, said that if the agency is
privatized as is sought by the Legarda and Revilla bills, the world
market price would prevail in the domestic market.
The price of rice is being
subsidized by the food authority to make the staple more affordable
to consumers.
“If price is lower in the world
market, there might be more importation and less incentive to
produce rice,” Gordon said.
He proposed that the fund for
importing rice, pegged by the food agency at P66 billion this year,
be used instead to rehabilitate irrigation systems, which would
enable farmers to plant rice twice a year.
“The P66 billion could
rehabilitate the irrigation systems in 1 million hectares. The 1
million hectares could produce 5 million metric tons of palay a
year. We could solve our rice shortage and create more jobs,”
Gordon said.
But rather than throw the bills
to the junkyard, he gave them another lease in life by scheduling
another hearing. Hopefully, Legarda and Revilla will be present
there. 
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