Official wants expanded functions for NFA

Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said there was a need to broaden the mandate of the National Food Authority (NFA) to ensure food stability in the country whether the agency would remain under the Office of the President or be brought back under the agriculture department.

“The NFA should be more than just a rice importing or a rice price stabilizing agency. It should function just as the name suggest—National Food Authority,” said Piñol on his Facebook page where he often posts about policies in his agency.

Aside from buying palay from local farmers and importing rice to ensure the supply of subsidized rice, the secretary said the grains agency must also “establish and operate regional food terminals, which would consolidate all food commodities produced in excess in a region which then would be repositioned in areas where these are needed.”

In a separate radio interview, he said that the problem with the NFA was not the lack of food but the lack of food positioning, given the minimal logistical support it gets from the government.

Piñol also wanted to expand the DA’s TienDA outlets —a program where the agency gathers small-holder farmers and entrepreneurs to sell their products without need for traders and middlemen—to allow poor families to have access to affordable food items.

He also wanted NFA to act as the government’s “National Agricultural Export Agency” to give producers an avenue to penetrate foreign markets.

“As it is now, farmers and fisherfolk are left on their own to find foreign markets for their products like bananas, mangoes, sardines, pineapples, bangus, tilapia, processed food and other products,” Piñol said.

“Acting as the export agency of the Filipino farmers and fisherfolk and other high-value crops producers could generate revenues for the NFA and make it financially viable,” he added.

He added that in the country, only big corporations with large agricultural lands were able to coordinate with multinational companies to find export markets for their produce.

The secretary noted that despite getting an accreditation from the World Trade Organization as the only trading agency in the country, the NFA has never taken advantage of it.

“Unless reforms are done, the NFA will forever wallow in deep debts because it is solely performing a function which causes billions of pesos in losses every year,” he said.