Children in state daycare centers to get rice porridge daily

MANILA, Philippines—Schoolchildren in 48,000 state-run daycare centers across the country will have daily hot porridge of surplus rice from the National Food Authority, NFA administrator Lito Banayo said Tuesday.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development is buying more than 400,000 bags of the NFA’s 2009 surplus for its feeding program to help the agency free up its warehouses of the rice glut, said Banayo.

“They’ve planned to come up with a different menu of rice porridges with iron and vitamin fortification to feed children in daycare centers daily,” he announced at a forum sponsored by the Catholic Media Network in Manila.

But the DSWD program using NFA rice would only unload one million tons of rice, said Banayo. “Our bodegas have 41 million tons of rice which is equivalent to a 57-day stock,” he added.

Due to the overimportation of rice during the Arroyo administration, Banayo said, the stocks in NFA warehouses were now double their normal level. He said earlier that the country was “swimming in rice,” prompting civil society groups and lawmakers to demand that the commodity be distributed free to the poor.

But Banayo said on Tuesday that the agency would sell the oversupply and start bidding out some three million metric tons from the 2008 stocks between this month and September, prior to the harvest season.

“We will intensify our sale through market-determined prices to our outlets all over the country,” he said, adding that NFA had at least until November to mid-January to make way for the new crop since the El Niño phenomenon delayed the planting season.

In his first State of the Nation Address July 26, President Aquino said that the Arroyo administration imported huge amounts of rice that were left rotting while many poor households faced hunger. He said the importation bloated the NFA’s debt to over P177 billion.

Banayo said that the NFA financially bled further when former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, without scrutiny and basis, hiked the selling price of rice from farmers from P10.50 to P17 “in one fell swoop” but at the same time cut the sale of rice to urban consumers at P16.25 in 2008.

If the buying price from farmers was raised to P17, the cost of one kilo of rice to consumers must have been pegged at P34. “The NFA was losing more than 100 percent for every one kilo of rice sold to the market,” he pointed out.

But Banayo said that Ms Arroyo moved to raise the buying price of rice from farmers and lowering the selling cost to consumers two years ago for “political survival” following the tumultuous years of the “Hello Garci” controversy beginning in 2005.

Political considerations had also attended the price regulation of rice during the Arroyo administration, he said.

Arroyo administration officials say that the government had to maintain a rice buffer for the lean months and that the massive purchases abroad were a result of a global food crisis from 2007 and the need to subsidize the staple for poor consumers while at the same time protecting farmers. –Jocelyn R. Uy, Philippine Daily Inquirer