RICE prices up as supply dips,” says a Sun.Star Cebu headline last Tuesday. So where have the 26,000 bags of rice that the Bureau of Customs (BOC), Cebu Port sold at P1,560 per bag at a public auction last May gone?
The price of commercial rice increased by P300 per bag this week because of the onset of the lean season for rice production, said Ma. Lucia Rosales, spokesperson of the National Food Authority (NFA) regional office.
I don’t think consumers panicked over the report. On the contrary, this development is a blessing for suppliers of commercial rice. This would mean more profit and more smuggled rice coming in.
Some consumers even think smuggled rice can bring down the price of commercial rice.
That’s true, but that is bad for rice farmers whose farmlands are dwindling in size.
Cebu, whose major crop is corn, will always be hit by the rise in the price of the staple food. Our rice supply comes from the rice granaries of Mindanao and Luzon.
Because of the conversion of vast rice lands in Luzon into industrial or commercial zones, our country is now importing rice from Vietnam or Thailand. Think about it. The rice technology of those countries originated from the University of the Philippines (UP) in Los Baños.
The auctioned 26,000 bags of rice were part of the tons of the staple that entered the port of Cebu a month before the May 13 polls from Vietnam.
The BOC seized several container vans containing the said item because these were declared as stone slabs, granite slabs, granite tiles, and ceiling and wall insulation slabs.
The remaining 292,280 bags of rice are still in the custody of the BOC Port of Cebu.
As to why the BOC is still keeping them, only Commissioner Ruffy Biazon or Cebu Port Customs Collector Edward de la Cuesta knows.
BOC Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence Danilo Lim told the press when the container vans were opened last May that the more than 600,000 bags of seized rice were enough to feed a community.
It seems that our government bureaucrats don’t know their left hand from their right hand. Collector de la Cuesta stood by his position to sell the remaining 292,280 bags of rice in a public auction instead of a negotiated sale to the NFA.
The BOC is a bureau of the Department of Finance and Finance Secretary Cesar Purisima already issued a statement to sell the remaining bags of rice to the NFA at a negotiated price of P850 per bag.
De la Cuesta is after the P40 million the item would earn in an auction sale. But Mr. Collector, what is P40-million in income compared with the thousands of middle class families that would benefit from the sale of cheap but quality rice?
Conversely, de la Cuesta’s insistence not to sell the remaining bags of rice to NFA at a negotiated price could be misunderstood that the bureau is up to something.
It may sound funny but it’s true. While the NFA is the government agency that regulates the sale of grains and their price, it is toothless. Influential smugglers even use NFA’s quota in the importation of rice.
Rosales’s call for consumers to buy “iron-fortified rice” that makes children healthy and is good for lactating mothers would only fall on deaf ears. Most NFA rice retailers do not follow the agency’s retail price. Also, NFA rice has the smell of chemicals.
The rice that NFA supplies to retailers is imported from Vietnam. Yet the quality of the rice NFA sells is below those that importers also buy from Vietnam.
Does this mean that the rice that NFA imports from Vietnam is of the lower kind?
I think NFA officials answered the same question years back, but they failed to satisfy the consumers.
(elespinoza53@yahoo.com)
