Hullabaloo over P20 per kilo rice

COMMONSENSE

- MARICHU A. VILLANUEVA

Taking place in the last stretch of the election campaign period, a plan to sell rice at P20 per kilo in the markets went a-boiling. But the P20 per kilo rice will only be available supposedly all over the Visayas provinces. So instead of being a welcomed development, it has become a political football between the administration candidates and the self-proclaimed opposition bets in the coming May 12 mid-term elections.

The huge, drastic price cut comes as President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. (PBBM) is almost halfway into his six-year term in office. The P20 per kilo rice will finally deliver PBBM's campaign promise as his rating dropped 17 points—a decline to just 25 percent from the 42 percent he enjoyed in a Pulse Asia survey done in February.

As announced last week by Department of Agriculture (DA) Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr., the government intends to allocate P3.5 billion to P4.5 billion to subsidize the program that will start in the Visayas region. According to Tiu Laurel, the plan to sell P20-per-kilo rice came up after PBBM met with 12 governors at the Cebu Provincial Capitol last April 23. The plan cropped up after PBBM attended the campaign rally in Cebu of the 11-man senatorial ticket and local candidates running under the administration-backed Alyansa ng Bagong Pilipinas.

"Our President has given the directive to the Department of Agriculture to formulate this to be sustainable and to continue until 2028," Tiu Laurel disclosed. Thus, the P20 per kilo rice program will run until December but may be extended to February 2026, or even until 2028, he cited. The national and local governments will share the cost of subsidizing the cheap rice, the DA chief further explained.