CITY OF SAN FERNANDO —A "tight" escorting system from government-maintained warehouses to delivery points makes the diversion of rice stocks from the National Food Authority difficult if not improbable for accredited retailers, NFA Pampanga manager Elvira Obaña said on Thursday.
Obaña claimed so on the heels of allegations that two leaders of the Pampanga Rice Retailers Association (PRRA) have been diverting half of the shares of its 124 members to the commercial market.
"Our office has hired 22 escorts. They’re in the market daily even on Saturday and Sunday especially during typhoon events," she said, adding that the system has been in place since January this year.
According to her, the P18.25 rice is sold only in at least 69 Tindahan Natin stores whose operators were identified by the Department of Social Welfare and Development.
The P25 and P35 NFA rice are sold by 124 PRRA members clustered in groups of three or four under the Institutionalized Bigasan sa Palengke (IBSP).
Rolling stores by 20 local governments and 14 parishes sell the same stocks. The same stocks are sold in two NFA-managed Bagsakan sa Palengke in Mabalacat and Sta. Ana towns, she said.
Rolling stores by the local governments get 200 to 300 bags weekly. Tindahan Natin’s allocations stand at 60 bags per week; parishes, 40; and Bagsakan, 50.
Like the supplies sold to retailers, the rice stocks are repacked in one or two kgs. Inside every pack is a paper stub informing the buyers that the stocks come from the NFA. These, she said, comprise another system to preempt efforts to pass off the NFA grains as commercial rice.
"The hoarding and diversion do not happen because the stocks are escorted from the warehouse to the delivery point. We also deploy watchers in the market. There is beginning and ending inventory. Apart from these, we have an NFA monitoring team. There is a also a composite monitoring team from the [Department of Trade and Industry, Department of Agriculture and National Bureau of Investigation]," Obaña said.
According to her, the IBSP clusters get between 200 and 500 bags weekly.
She said Ruben Miranda and Rico Cunanan, who were tagged by a source as behind the scheme, run their own rolling stores. Miranda, a municipal councilor in Magalang, had earlier denied that he and Cunanan are into the alleged diversion racket.
They are also authorized to pick-up allocations on behalf of PRRA members to be able to save on transport costs, she said.
Obaña said Reggie David, identified by Miranda as a former vice president of the PRRA, is a licensed dealer but does not sell NFA rice.
An anti-hoarding drive by the NBI last June showed David to be not in violation of any law, she said.
"We stepped up our monitoring when the media reported hoarding and diversion years ago. We’re still on the watch and some people still have suspicions," she said.
In a related development, Miranda was a subject of a complaint by businessman Trinidad Gonzales.
In a letter to Magalang Vice Mayor Norman Lacson, Gonzales noted "conflict of interest and bad faith" on Miranda when the latter worked for the passage of a resolution that authorized the mayor to enter into a memorandum of agreement with the NFA for the purchase of rice for relief operations.
Obaña showed a copy of the MOA which was not signed by the mayor due to an election dispute. "The stocks were not availed of," she said.
Miranda said he has been an NFA rice retailer for 20 years before he first ran for public office in 2004.
Obaña said the allegations were false and baseless, done out of "envy" for long-time accredited retailers like Miranda.
She said she has turned down the requests of 40 barangay captains to operate rolling stores in the villages because the same outlets are operating in the towns and having so much would be difficult to monitor.
