Rice fund raises stakes for farmers

Five years ago, lawmakers and government officials made a promise of a lifetime: the country's rice farmers would be competitive at long last.

- JASPER EMMANUEL ARCALAS

That promise was embodied in four letters: RCEF, short for Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund.

The fund was created by the landmark Republic Act 11203 or the Rice Tariffication Law, which took effect on March 5, 2019 and which liberalized the country's rice trade regime.

To help Filipino rice farmers compete against the free entry of imported rice, RCEF was born.

The six-year fund - set to end this year had one goal: make farmers competitive. How? Through the provision of at least P10 billion worth of support in the form of seeds, machines, credit and extension work.

Fast forward to today, lawmakers and government officials are making another promise: extend the life of the fund to make the farmers competitive - at long last?

Pushing for extension

A week before RA 11203 turned five last Feb. 14, Sen. Cynthia Villar, the principal author of the law, made a momentous remark.

"I am sponsoring the Rice Tariffication Law extension bill," Villar told the staff of the Philippine Rice Research Institute in Nueva Ecija, the country's rice granary.

Villar said extending RCEF is necessary to reach the government's goal of a national average palay yield of six metric tons per hectare. She said the current average yield remains below five MT per hectare.

RCEF was envisioned to raise farmers' income by 30 percent by improving their yield, slashing production costs and reducing post-harvest losses.

"You have to renew (RCEF) for another five years because we have not yet achieved what we wanted to achieve," Villar said in a separate interview with reporters recently.

The goal is also to bring down production cost of palay to P6 per kilogram, which she noted remains far from reality, she said.