Saturday, March 29, 2008 Arroyo orders filing of raps v. 8 rice distributors
PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo ordered the National Food Authority (NFA) to prioritize the filing of criminal charges against eight government accredited rice distributors in Butuan City that were found to be overpricing the NFA rice.
Arroyo, after inspecting the rice stockpiles stored at the NFA warehouses in Butuan Thursday afternoon with Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap, instructed the NFA central office to coordinate and work with NFA-Butuan in charging and expediting the legal process against the alleged profiteers.
NFA-Butuan officer-in-charge Gil Pepito Pequeo reported to Arroyo and Yap that the eight are based in Agusan del Norte and Butuan City, but they are unable to expedite the filing of charges due to the lack of a legal department in NFA-Butuan.
The President tasked Yap to ensure the coordination between the NFA offices in Manila and Butuan.
Yap said the presidential directive aims to "send a strong message to profiteers and unscrupulous individuals who take advantage of the perceived rice shortage to jack up prices of the low-cost NFA rice and in turn deny our countrymen their constitutional right to affordable but quality food items".
He added that aside from campaign against profiteers, the government is also re-licensing all NFA-accredited distributors and palay (rice grain) traders "to weed out those groups or individuals involved in profiteering activities" and "prevent those thinking of joining these nefarious activities to change their minds and stay on the path of truth and honest business practicing".
Presidential Anti-Smuggling Group Chief Antonio Villar said aside from the ongoing operations against rice smugglers, his office is closely coordinating with the NFA and the Department of Agriculture (DA) in tracking down NFA hoarders.
Villar said there are big "smuggling and hoarding" operations in the Visayas and Mindanao where some of the exchanges and illegal rice trades are done in the high seas. He reiterated that there would be no sacred cow in the government's campaign against smuggling or rice hoarding.
Meanwhile, the President has expressed full support to the proposal of House Speaker Prospero Nograles for the adoption of "corporate farming" as a government policy to promote food security and ordered the DA to conduct a study on how this scheme can be put into action.
Nograles said this was personally conveyed to him by President Arroyo along with the assurance that reports of a rice shortage are completely baseless and exaggerated.
At the same time, the Speaker said he is prepared to support proposals for the extension of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (Carp) provided there will be no more conversions of agricultural lands and allot areas for corporate farming.
He said the House leadership is reviewing several proposals to extend the program as well as its funding requirements. The Carp (Republic Act 6657) is set to expire in June 2008.
Nograles has recommended that the government can adopt corporate farming as one possible scheme to increase food production and tap Mindanao which still has vast tracks of arable but underutilized lands as the country's primary food basket.
The same concept of promoting food security is also being espoused by Palawan Representative Abraham Mitra, chairman of the House committee on agriculture and food, who proposed to require the country's top 100 corporations to engage in agricultural production to feed their own employees. Members of the Mindanao bloc in the House of Representatives are also backing the proposal.
While the details of the proposal has yet to be fleshed out and is still on its conceptual stage, Nograles said corporations and other business entities with at least 2,000 employees should be required to engage in corporate farming with rice as their primary crop.
"Vast tracks of unused public lands, particularly those in Mindanao, can be tapped for such corporate farms. Corporations can also enter into joint venture agreements with farmer-beneficiaries of agrarian reform," he said. (JMR/Sunnex)
