The Daily Tribune

31 January 2010

The Philippines-The National Food Authority (NFA) has immediately sealed off the 20,000 bags of rice previously unloaded from the Vietnamese boat MV Trai Thien 66 to pave the way for an investigation into reports that the rice shipments from Vietnam was laced with ammonium sulfate.

NFA Administrator Jessup Navarro yesterday said he had ordered a halt to the unloading of the shipment’s remaining delivery until the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA) completes the analysis of the substance mixed with the rice shipment.

Navarro added the NFA has also committed to fully cooperate with the PDEA and other government agencies in charge of combating illegal drugs until those responsible for the reported shipment of are finally captured.

The MV Thrai Thien 66, which directly sailed from Vietnam, was loaded with 76,000 bags of imported rice intended for Bacolod City, Negros Occiental province.

Navarro said exporting countries like Vietnam directly charter ships to deliver their rice cargo to the Philippines which are then unloaded at various ports nationwide.

He said it was the NFA’s quality control officer who discovered the substance in the shipments.

“It is a strict policy of the NFA to continuously conduct random sampling of rice shipments to check if the imported rice adhere to the required quality specifications before unloading them from the vessel,” he said.

Navarro said the NFA immediately alerted the Bureau of Customs (BoC) upon the discovery of the other cargo aside from rice, which was supposed to be its exclusive load.

The BoC, in turn, notified the PDEA for the appropriate analysis of the bags of ammonium sulfate mixed in the shipment.

Ammonium sulfate is an inorganic salt with a number of commercial uses, the most common of which is as a soil fertilizer. It is also used as an agricultural spray adjuvant for water soluble insecticides, herbicides and fungicides, as well as a food additive and as flame retardant.

Relatedly, Makati City Mayor Jejomar “Jojo” Binay has called for a thorough review of the government’s agricultural policy in the wake of rising rice importations and the influx of cheap food items due to the country’s accession to several free trade agreements.

Binay said last year was a sad year for agriculture as the NFA imported 2.3 million metric tons (MMT) of rice, a historic high that made the country the world’s biggest rice importer.

Worse, he added, total agricultural output last year grew by an insignificant 0.37 percent while the population growth rate hit 2.36 percent.

“What this means is that for the past several years, government has not improved farm yield modestly so much so that it has to blame climate change and the typhoons for the disastrous performance,” Binay said.

The Makati mayor, also the vice presidential candidate of the United Opposition (UNO) in the forthcoming national elections, wondered why the country’s collective rice yield continues to lag in spite of the P43.7 billion that the government has plunked in for the Fields program.

Binay asserted that the administration has failed to stop the steady reduction of farm land, arguing that the loss of about 50,000 hectares of fertile land for other purposes would contribute to chronic food crises.

“It’s tragic that the more we convert land planted to rice and other crops into plantations for the foreign market, the higher is the rate of our food importations,” he said.

Binay warned of a food crisis in the wake of the country’s accession to several free trade agreements, all of which reduce the tariff on imported food items, including the Asean Free Trade Agreement that will start this year and the accord for a tariff-free trade with China.

He proposed for the adoption of a food policy that addresses higher farm yields through the development of better-yielding, more nutritious rice, better infrastructure, including farm-to-market roads (FMRs), post-harvest equipment and irrigation facilities.

“The reason farmers are reluctant to be more efficient is the import-led food policy of the government, using the argument that there is practically a constant 10 percent annual rice production deficit. This argument has led to historic-high rice importations and the corollary reduction in farmgate palay prices to the level that could not recoup their production costs,” he said.

According to him, the “country’s total rice importation is roughly equivalent to the total volume of post-harvest losses, based on documents from government and the private sector.”

“We have to do more to recover more grains, and drying palay in basketball courts and highways are a surefire formula for higher post-harvest losses,” he further said.

Binay also called for the development of better post-harvest facilities and more efficient milling equipment since the recovery rate for the cono-type milling machines used widely in the country is 62 percent at best.

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