The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) is studying whether the government should lift the price cap on rice in two weeks or once the local harvests and the shipments from other countries augment the market supply.
“Because the price cap became effective on Sept. 5th, and we’re now the 11th, so six days. In maybe another two weeks, we’ll have a good idea of the availability of supply. This means, within September, we’re looking at 5 million metric tons of harvests and some entry of imported rice,” Trade Secretary Alfredo Pascual said in an interview.
“So maybe within two weeks, we should be able to see whether we can lift the price cap already,” Pascual said.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. earlier issued Executive Order No. 39 to impose price ceilings of P41 per kilogram of regular-milled rice and P45 per kilo of well-milled rice. This forced the government to subsidize retailers who were selling the grain at a loss.
Several farmers complained of the declining buying prices of palay because of the ceiling.
Palay harvest in Nueva Ecija, a major rice-producing province, is expected to peak by mid-September to late October 2023, but farmers said the buying price fell to P17 to P18 per kilogram.
“We’re afraid that traders, millers and other merchants would buy our harvest at a uniform lower price,” a group of farmers said in a field monitoring activity by the National Rice Program of the Department of Agriculture.
Farmers asked the President, who also serves as the Department of Agriculture secretary, to intervene so that they would get better rates for their harvests.
The Philippine Statistics Authority reported that palay output in the first semester of 2023 reached 9 million metric tons, up by 3.4 percent from 8.7 million MT in the same period in 2022.