MANILA – A ranking Department of Finance official has raised the need to enhance rice productivity programs to make this product competitive and lessen the need to protect.
In an economic bulletin issued Friday, Finance undersecretary Gil Beltran said local rice has a 44.4 percent effective protection rate (EPR), a measure of tariff protection given to a sector vis-a-vis its value-added.
Beltran said the current effective protection rate of rice means “that for every peso of value added, it is accorded a 44.4 percent price edge over the competing import.”
While rice enjoys a high EPR, Beltran pointed out hog farming has negative 13.3 percent; meat production, processing and preserving, negative 12 percent; slaughtering and packing of bovine animals, negative eight percent; and cattle farming, negative 7.2 percent.
He said the negative EPRs for these downstream industries result in high cost and translates to high prices for the commodities.
These entail the need for these sectors to be “super-efficient to survive import competition,” he added.
Beltran further said the rice sector remains to have a high EPR despite the end of the quantitative restriction policy.
“The Department of Agriculture will need to implement rice productivity programs to enhance the sector’s competitiveness. Only when the productivity has increased can the country unwind the high protection and enable downstream industries and consumers some breathing space,” he said. (PNA)
