From a respected voice! ENCOURAGING By Dr. Emil Q. Javier

Rising inflation had been very much in the news lately, with a marked increase in the retail price of rice often cited as one of the major culprits.

Indeed, our rice sector has a long way to go to produce enough to meet our national requirement at a cost competitive to imports.

However, in fairness to the Department of Agriculture (DA), our national rice production had been increasing steadily during the last 50 years (1968-2018) at a respectable rate of 3.18%.

In fact, our average palay yield is higher than that of Thailand from whom we import rice. But Thailand has three times more riceland and 30-million less people to feed.

Still and all that growth rate in rice production while commendable was not enough to match our population growth and rising per capita consumption.

(I read this excerpt of the article written by Dr. Emil Q. Javier, former President of the University of the Philippines, which saw print in the Agriculture Magazine. I decided to copy paste it and post it here to give readers a better perspective of how the DA has been working to improve Agriculture in the country, even with a diminishing budget – P65-B in 2017, P55-B in 2018, and – had it not been for the return of the NFA, PCA and FPA to the DA and the additional allocation at the last minute which increased the budget to P120-B – it would have been P49-B only for 2019.)

(Attached photos were downloaded from public websites.)