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CITY OF MALOLOS, Bulacan -- The National Food Authority (NFA) has tapped the services of private rice traders to mill its palay (unhusked rice) stocks.
Ed Camua, acting provincial manager of NFA-Bulacan, said on Tuesday that at least 12 private traders from the Intercity Industrial Estate in Bocaue town took part in the test milling of the agency’s palay inventories in the province.
Camua said the NFA has some 600,000 bags of palay stocked in its warehouses in Bulacan, scheduled to be milled this month.
Piolito Santos, NFA 3 (Central Luzon) director, cited the need to use the services of the privately-owned rice mills as their agency has only five rice mills in the region with an input capacity of 2,400 bags per day.
With 1.9 million bags of palay inventory in its warehouses in Central Luzon, Santos said the agency cannot comply with its scheduled milling period.
“The milling of palay stocks is part of the NFA’s compliance (with) the instruction that we must have ‘rolling buffer stock development’, which means that we buy from the farmers and distribute it immediately,” he said.
Santos said the NFA would be able to monetize its palay stocks and roll its subsidy to buy more palay from farmers.
He also said that the private rice millers are the partners of the NFA in the development of the grains industry and are part of the agency’s mission “to promote the integrated growth and modernization of the rice and corn marketing industry to enable to compete in the global market.”
He noted that in the previous milling operations, NFA-3 used about 50 privately-owned rice mills and 24,000 bags of milling input per day.
The milled palay became the government’s rice buffer stock, its “palay inventory needs to be milled or replenished to preserve its quality” and help decongest their warehouses, Santos said.
He added that the NFA lacks storage facilities and leases privately-owned warehouses to accommodate more palay procurement from local farmers.
Santos said NFA-3 has 450,000 bags remaining out of the total 3.4 million bags of imported rice that arrived from December 2018 to March this year.
He added that the remaining 450,000 bags form part of the NFA’s food security stocks, which would last only for six days considering that the region’s daily rice consumption requirement is 76,140 bags. (PNA)
