THE National Food Authority (NFA) said it will auction its older rice stocks by early May to facilitate more rice procurement, following weak take-up from local government units (LGUs) during the food security emergency.
NFA Administrator Larry del Rosario Lacson said the auction is authorized by the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) emergency order, which allows for the disposal of NFA inventory to boost supply and stabilize prices.
“I will launch an auction under the law,” he told reporters. “We will be targeting the regions whose warehouses are full so that we can free them up, then we can buy.”
Mr. Lacson said the NFA has yet to determine the floor price for the auction but noted that it is weighing a price that will be attractive relative to the P30-P34 per kilogram price traders pay for imported rice.
“You can set it at P38 but if they can buy imported rice at P30 to P34, who will bid?”
Mr. Lacson said farmer cooperatives and the private sector will also be allowed to participate in the auction.
The DA on Feb. 3 declared a rice emergency, allowing the NFA — which is barred by law from selling rice directly to the public — to release inventory to government agencies, LGUs, and government-backed markets.
However, the NFA said the volume of rice it had released since the emergency declaration was only 20,000 bags — well below the monthly target of 500,000 bags.
The NFA’s rice inventory as of April 11 was equivalent to 7.17 million bags, including 9 million bags of palay (unmilled rice) and 1.2 million bags of rice.
Rice imports fell 46% year on year to 641,000 metric tons in the year to date ending March 13. A US Department of Agriculture report in March said Philippine rice imports will likely decline 1.9% to this year due to an expected increase in domestic production.
The farmgate price of palay continues to decline by a reported 24.4% year on year in March to an average of P18.57 per kilogram.
The NFA, which is required by law to buy palay from farmers to maintain a minimum rice inventory, pays P23 to P30 per kilo for clean and dry palay, and P17 to P23 per kilo for fresh/wet palay.
Raul Q. Montemayor, national manager of the Federation of Free Farmers, said the average farmgate price of P18.57 per kilo for dry palay would be equivalent to around P15-16/kilo for wet/freshly harvested palay.
But some farmers were citing farmgate prices of P13-14 per kilo for freshly harvested palay, he said via Viber.
“Imports in January-February appear to have slackened but picked up in March. There was also probably a lot of leftover stock from last year that spilled over to 2025 which, together with incoming harvests, led to higher total supply,” he noted.
Mr. Montemayor said international prices continue to fall, “so palay traders are probably hedging against low market prices in the coming months and therefore buying from farmers at a low price.” — Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza