By LITO RULONA,Correspondent
THE Sangguniang Panlalawigan (SP) has approved a resolution supporting the advocates and stakeholders of the food industry in the campaign against all forms and measures to dismantle, removal of commercial functions, decouple or privatization of the National Food Authority (NFA) and other Agriculture-Related Government Agencies.
This was disclosed by Committee on Agriculture and Food Security chairman Fredrick Khu said after due deliberation on the matter, we agreed to pass resolution in the plenary against the privatization of the National Food Authority (NFA).
Khu said the manager of the NFA-Misamis Oriental Provincial Office wrote a letter request dated September 28, has asked support from the SP in the campaign against all forms and measures to dismantle, removal of commercial functions, decouple or privatize the NFA.
“The SP members finds the said request meritorious to support,” he said.
He said the NFA is mandated as a vital partner of the government in the pursuit to maintain food security in staple cereals especially in times and places of natural or man-made calamity or emergency and stabilization of staple cereal supply and prices.
“NFA mounting debts are used to justify its proposed privatization”, he added.
However, Khu explained in his recommendation that the NFA’s debt accumulated over the years, represents the costs that the agency incurred in fulfilling its mandate of stabilizing the price and supply of rice at both the farm gate and consumer level.
He said NFA’s accumulated debts or losses are also actually the cost of the government’s social responsibility to make rice – the basic staple food of Filipinos – available, affordable and accessible especially to the victims of calamities, the poor, low income families, and those living in remote areas of the country.
“The presence of NFA buying stations in localities significantly influences Palay prices, increasing them as government buys Palay at higher prices. Without the participation of NFA in buying the Palay produce of small rice farmers would eventually lead to monopoly on palay trading by the profiteering private sector,” he pointed out.
Khu said it is a simple fact that without NFA, small rice farmers will face trading losses and there will be no more reason for them to continue farming.
He said the SP believes that a one-hundred percent food sufficiency is a very sound and logical public policy to achieve genuine food security, particularly on rice and on food production, instead of the incessant yet disadvantageous policy of rice importation.
