Lowering rice tariffs will further Filipino farmers, Senator Francis Pangilinan said Monday.
“Our farmers will bear the brunt of this order. They are already hard-pressed as it is with the non-stop arrival of imported rice and the pandemi,” Pangilinan said in reaction to the issuance of Executive Order 135 which lowers rice tariffs from 50 and 40 percent for in-quota and out-quota respectively to 35 percent for imports coming from so-called Most Favored Nations, particularly, India, Pakistan, and China.
“Now, it is as if they are burying our farmers in more hardships with the tariff reduction,” said the former head of the National Food Authority Council.
Pangilinan said he found it odd that the government is slashing the tariff when economic managers have assured the public of a steady supply of rice in recent hearings at the Senate.
He said rice farmers groups have been calling him up to seek his intervention on the executive action.
“This is a double whammy for our rice farmers. They have reduced funds under the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund and now they have more competitors in the market,” he said.
Pangilinan, who was also able to save the government some P6 billion in public funds when he made the rice importation process transparent, accountable, and competitive during his stint as Presidential Assistant on Food Security and Agricultural Modernization, pointed to a bigger problem with the continuing liberalization of food and agricultural products.
“ur rice sufficiency level dropped from 95 percent in 2017 to 79.8 percent in 2019. We don’t have the figures for 2020 yet,” he said.
“If this goes down further, or if rice farmers can no longer have decent earnings, we will lose our farmers. We will become dependent then on other countries for our agriculture sufficiency,” he said.