Duterte said urgency drove him to import rice

October 12, 2018

DAVAO CITY – President Rodrigo Duterte said on Friday the urgency to ensure supply of rice drove him to order importation of rice in the middle of the harvest month.

He took to task Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Pinol to work out  how to absorb local production of rice farmers, “whether during harvest time, or on a later period after that”.

The stomach comes first. So the policy of the government is to keep the people away from hunger,” Duterte said in his arrival remarks at the Davao International Airport where he came from a gathering of Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) leaders in Indonesia.

He said he heard the proponents and opponents on imports during September and October when farmers were supposed to be harvesting, and to begin preparing for the next planting.

But the typhoon season damaged rice lands, Duterte said.

“Because of the not so predictable weather now, it has affected really rice planting. So I don’t know if it is now a truism but climate change maybe has made storms violent, and longer periods of dry and wet season,” he said.

He said he would leave it to Pinol to find out how local rice would not be left out in the market. “There must be space for the local products to be consumed, [to be] bought and consumed”, said Duterte

“So we have to import, whether we like it or not and we have to plan,” he added.

He said he had been wary about projecting self-sufficiency in rice, saying aside from natural calamities conversion of agricultural lands for cash crop plantations and non-agricultural use have put pressure on protecting production areas.

“It’s the food crop plus the cash crop. We cannot control unless we expropriate but that is not a good way of doing it in governance that you just have to take away the lands where many depend on their livelihood),” he said.

He said this would be a balancing act for government, “and that’s the job of Piñol [and] and I hope he will do his homework well in the years to come”. DMS