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[av_heading heading=’PH should learn from India’s rice program’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=’30’ subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’18’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=” av-medium-font-size-title=” av-small-font-size-title=” av-mini-font-size-title=” av-medium-font-size=” av-small-font-size=” av-mini-font-size=” admin_preview_bg=”]
BY JOHNNY NOVERA
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February 11, 2018
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PRESIDENT Rodrigo R. Duterte recently made a visit to India and received $1.25-billion worth of investment pledges.
It is good to know that India has remained friendly to us even if at one time we have shown dislike and openly denounced the 5-6 money lending activities of some of their nationals that lend to our small tiangge operators and market vendors.
India is the second biggest country in the world. Its population was reported in 2017 at 1,339,180,127 next to China’s 1,409,517,397.
The Philippines ranks 13th in the world in population at 104,918,090 as of July 2017. One thing we have in common with China and India is that like them we also eat rice as our staple food.
It is interesting that among rice-eating countries India was able to increase production of rice and became self-sufficient in the cereal with their government simply adopting a program of paying their farmers twice the market price of their produce at harvest time.
While the debate on rice production strategy continues to stop our reliance on imports, it is not too late for our National Food Authority (NFA) to try the same rice procurement scheme like that of India by paying the farmer double the market price of his palay at harvest time.
We believe this will solve our rice production problem once and for all. With this profit motivation, the acreage of farms for rice cultivation will immediately expand.
A similar situation happened during the extended administration of President Ferdinand Marcos for our sugar crop while we were under Martial Law in the ‘70s. When the price of sugar in the world market went up, sugar farm areas expanded in acreage without much prodding to the farmers. Profit was a strong motivation for them.
We wonder if Agriculture secretary Emmanuel M. Piñol was with the President’s party during the latter’s recent visit to India. We recommend that he now lead a mission and study how India actually increased the acreage of their rice farms with full government support in buying their rice production at 200 percent of the prevailing price at harvest time. It is good to emulate the system as it can transform the whole country to become self-sufficient in rice with no further imports.
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Historical Quote of the Week: “Iloilo is the first province in the Philippines to export sugar to Australia.” (For comments or reactions, please e-mail to jnoveracompany@yahoo.com)/PN
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