Marcos: Nat’l food emergency seen to lower rice prices
The looming declaration of a national food emergency will “force” the high prices of rice down and will help the market work properly, President Marcos said on Friday.
Mr. Marcos said the Department of Agriculture (DA) may declare a national food emergency on rice by next week once it receives the formal recommendation of the interagency National Price Coordinating Council.
“Next week, the DA might receive the recommendation, and I believe it is going to be, to declare an emergency. The reason that we are doing this is, we already did everything we could to lower the price of rice, but the market is not being allowed to work properly,” the President said in an interview in Burauen, Leyte.
He stressed the supply-and-demand curve is not being followed because rice is still being sold at high prices even if the government has done its part to lower the cost of inputs in rice production.
Mr. Marcos was referring to efforts to bring down rice prices, such as Executive Order No. 62 issued in June 2024 that slashed the tariff on imported rice from 35 percent to 15 percent until 2028.
Two months after EO 62’s issuance, Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. said the full impact of the rice tariff cut, which is lower rice prices, may be felt in January 2025.
According to the DA’s price monitoring report for Jan. 15, the price of imported commercial rice was between P44 per kilo to P65 per kilo, while local commercial rice ranged from P37 to P63 per kilo, way above the P29 per kilo of rice the government expected.
“So we have to force that price down and we have to make sure the market works properly, that there’s no friction cost that will happen because of many things. Some of these things are illegal in nature and that’s why Congress is investigating that,” Mr. Marcos said.
