The number of individual farmers and farmer cooperatives selling palay to the National Food Authority (NFA) in this province has significantly increased since the implementation of Republic Act 11203 or the Rice Tariffication Law.

Ed Camua, acting provincial manager of the National Food Authority (NFA)-Bulacan, said with the prevailing low buying price of palay among private traders, farmers and farmers cooperatives prefer to sell their produce to the grains agency.

“This is because the NFA is offering a competitive price for the local farmers,” Camua said in an interview with Philippine News Agency (PNA) on Friday.

The NFA is buying palay for this cropping season at PHP19 per kilo for clean and dried palay, while the private traders at PHP16.50.

Based on the report of NFA-Bulacan, 198 walk-in farmers, 43 registered farmers, and 204 members of farmer cooperatives sold their palay in their agency since the implementation of Rice Tariffication Law

“Before Republic Act 11203 was implemented, only half of those numbers sold their palay in our agency. In the past, we have even asked our farmers to sell their palay to us because they preferred to private traders. Now, we are getting ‘traffic’ here in the NFA with the number of farmers selling their palay to us,” he said.

As a result, he said 3,700 cavans of palay were procured by NFA-Bulacan last September and 41,609 cavans in the middle of October.

Camua said the NFA-Bulacan is targeting to procure some 220,000 bags of palay in November and 150,000 bags of palay in December.

Aside from the newly-procured palay from local farmers, he said there are some 750,000 cavans of imported rice stocked in the NFA-Bulacan warehouse. (PNA)