Occidental Mindoro town building rice processing hub

A town in Occidental Mindoro will get a P60-million rice processing system (RPS) designed to reduce farmers’ postharvest losses and improve the quality of milled rice, the Philippine Center for Postharvest Development and Mechanization (PHilMech) said.

In a statement, PHilMech said they recently broke ground in Rizal town one unit of multi-stage rice mill and two units of mechanical dryers.

“This project is a complementation effort of PHilMech and the [local government] of Rizal, which aims to reduce postharvest losses among the farmers’ produce, improve the rice processing system in the province, and make the state-of-the-art facilities in drying and milling [available] to the farmers,” PHilMech said.

PHilMech signed a memorandum of agreement with the local government of Rizal, which had also received earlier P46 million worth of agricultural machinery.

As of end-May, PHilMech has completed a total of seven RPS and is constructing another 31 processing systems. Another 63 RPS are slated for post-qualification evaluation.

The distribution of processing systems forms part of the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund (RCEF)-Mechanization Program.

The program is a component of the Rice Tariffication Law that liberalized rice trading and lifted quantitative restriction on importing rice. This will end in June next year.

The government earmarked a yearly budget of P5 billion, or half of the P10 billion collected annually from rice tariffs, for the RCEF Mechanization Program from 2019 to 2024 for the distribution of farm machines and equipment to qualified farmers groups and local governments.