Assist. Secretary Edilberto De Luna, who also serves as National Rice Program director, said the country can no longer impose quantitative restriction on rice importation and farmers from Central Luzon shall have to be competitive in Metro Manila market.
“Yung mga bigas na galing sa Central Luzon, kapag dinala mo sa Manila ay dapat kasing presyo ng bigas na galing sa Thailand at Vietnam,” De Luna told farmers in a harvest festival hosted by seed producer SL Agritech Corp. and Mayor Michael Manuel Friday.
“Kung hindi patay tayo,” De Luna said, noting that rice production in those countries is much lower than the P10 a kilo in the country.
The easiest way to this competitiveness, he stressed, is increasing per hectare yield by getting into hybrid rice production if not cutting off cost of inputs.
“Ang remedy diyan ay kung ang inaani mo ay four tons per hectare kinakailangang maging eight tons,” the official who also sits as acting executive director of the Science City of Munoz-based Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) said.
Thus, he said, he is push- Hybrid rice eyed to survive competition in ASEAN integration ing hybridization from Nueva Ecija to huge rice producing Mindanao.
Hybrid rice, whether commercial or public, is also a requisite in fulfilling the government’s rice sufficiency program which is so far short by at least one million metric tons, he said.
The DA targets a rice production of 20.05 million metric tons this year from about 19 million metric tons that was realized last year. To be able to realize the target, farm planted to hybrid rice should reach 500,000 this year from
the 285,000 hectares last year, according to De Luna. In 2013, hybrid farm was recorded at only 235,000 hectares.
Henry Lim, SLAC chief executive officer, said Nueva Ecija can be considered as hybrid rice capital of the Philippines with at least two-thirds of rice fields planted to hybrid. “For every two hectares (rice land), one hectare ay naka-hybrid,” Lim said.
This season, Lim said, some 80,000 hectares of 150,000 hectares of rice land in Nueva Ecija is planted to hybrid seeds. Lim cited the experience of Papua New Guinea (PNG) where hybrid rice production ended the decades of failure “of various government and private agencies to make rice production a worthy venture.”
Such failure, he said, has “left the country (PNG) 99 percent dependent on imported rice which mostly comes from Australia, with recorded annual average import of 150,000 tons, roughly worth 12.5 million in pesos.”
It appeared to be more practical for PNG to import rather than produce locally because their average yield was only 1 to 1.5 metric tons per hectare (roughly 20-25 sacks) until the company introduced SLAC seeds via Village Garden Ltd., a PNG company with corresponding farming technologies in November 2014.
This, he said, easily translated to 500 percent increase in their yield in February this year.
