CITY OF MALOLOS – To assure and to sustain the food security of the National Capital Region during the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Food Authority will give logistic support to rice millers from Bulacan and Nueva Ecija tapped to process the palay of the grain agency.
Elvira Obana, NFA assistant regional director for Central Luzon, said NFA officials met the agency’s accredited rice millers in both provinces to resolve the current problems affecting the milling operations such as difficulty in the mobilization of laborers, hauling of palay and rice stocks, procurement of equipment spare parts and difficulty in selling the rice by-products due to the implementation of the enhanced community quarantine.
The ECQ hampered the mobility of the laborers and rice mill maintenance personnel from doing their jobs due to lockdowns, suspension of public transport and establishment of various checkpoints.
Obana said that even NFA employees in their regional and provincial offices also encountered difficulties in passing through the ECQ checkpoints because many personnel manning the checkpoints reason out that only medical personnel are considered frontliners and NFA personnel are not included.
To address the problem, NFA will provide identification cards for the laborers and employees of 23 rice millers in Nueva Ecija and 11 rice millers in Bulacan as well as inter-agency task force stickers for their vehicles used for transporting palay and rice in the milling operation of the NFA.
The grain agency will inform the IATF and request the opening of some identified spare parts suppliers in Manila and will issue a certification to fast track the purchase of the spare parts and repair of the rice mill in case of bogs down.
Meanwhile, regarding the unavailability of rice mill laborers due to lockdowns in their locality, the NFA assured millers that they have more than enough laborers, most of them are tricycle drivers who stopped plying their route due to strict lockdown guidelines.
During the meeting, they informed the millers that NFA have made adjustments, specifically in guaranteed milling recovery so that they cope with the additional expenses in milling NFA stocks.
