PH rice stocks to last 39 days

August 5 ----- MALACAÑANG gave assurances that the country's rice stocks will last 39 days despite the massive destruction suffered by the agricultural sector from two recent typhoons.

"We are prepared. The production for up to the second quarter, we have something like 39 days of stocks of rice," DA Undersecretary Mercedita Sombilla said. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is concurrently the Agriculture secretary. Sombilla said the Department of Agriculture (DA) "has already prepositioned ways by which we could really increase production. The biggest rice production will still come sometime if not end of September, sometime in October. "So, we will be beefing up our supply and, of course, the usual supply that we will be also getting from imports," Sombilla said.

She added that the DA had already scheduled the importation of 1.3 million metric tons of rice to add to the country's stockpile. Apart from the destruction caused by the back-to-back weather disturbances, Sombilla cited the withdrawal of Russia from the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the ban imposed by India on exporting non-basmati white rice and the El Niño phenomenon as threats to the stabilization of rice supply in the Philippines. "So the President really, you know, consulted and discussed with the DA various interventions that the Department of Agriculture is now going to be preparing for. Actually, many of them are already ongoing in response to whatever the effects of these three global events are," she said.

The onslaught of typhoons "Egay" and "Falcon" left an estimated damage of P1.94 billion to agricultural crops, the DA said also on Tuesday. Of the figure, P950 million was incurred by the rice sector and P730 million by the corn sector. "So, those were the effects of super typhoons Egay and Falcon accompanied by the habagat (southwest monsoon)," National Food Authority Assistant Secretary Arnel de Mesa said in a Malacañang briefing.

De Mesa noted that interventions by the DA are now in place, in coordination with its regional offices and local government units in all typhoon-hit areas, especially Regions 1 and 2 (Ilocos and Cagayan Valley) and the Cordillera Administrative Region. "But again, as the President is very much worried, we really have to discuss ways by which we could really mitigate, you know, further effects of these events that are now unfolding," he said.

Source: manilatimes.net