BOCAUE, Bulacan, April 17 (PNA) – Private rice traders in Central Luzon and the National Food Authority have confirmed that there are enough palay (unhusked rice) being harvested for the current cropping season.
However, it has been noted that processing it into rice is encountering some problems due to the inability of many rice mill workers to report for work due to the implementation of the enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) that bans the operation of mass public transport, stringent checkpoints, among others.
Rose Dalangin, president of Golden City Business Park Association in Bocaue, Bulacan, explained to the Philippine News Agency on Friday that since the implementation of the ECQ, their rice mill laborers and secretaries encountered difficulties in reporting to work, thus their rice production outputs have been cut down from 30 percent to 50 percent of their normal operations.
A shuttle service for the rice mill workers will be beneficial to sustain the big rice demands of the local government units for their ECQ relief operations beside the normal daily rice requirements of the public consumers, Dalangin suggested.
The said problem, Dalangin noted is also compounded by the rising prices of palay that sells from P22-P22.50 per kilo for ordinary varieties to the benefit of the farmers but obviously unfavorable to the consumers since this led to higher commercial prices of rice.
Dalangin also pointed out that a major cause for the rising commercial prices of rice is the low procurement price of the rice brans, since many feed mills that use it as a major feed ingredient and has slowed down on its production due to ECQ plus the viral diseases Asian Swine Fever and Bird Flu causing swine and poultry raisers to have their production level on a minimum.
For the rice mills to operate unhampered, Dalangin said there is a need for its by-products like rice husks to be immediately disposed off to prevent its equipment from chocking, however, haulers are having a hard time disposing these rice by-products.
On the other hand, Judy Carol Dansal, NFA administrator, has confirmed that the palay stocks that the NFA has procured in Central Luzon are encountering difficulties for it to be processed into rice, particularly by private rice mills tapped to mill their unhusked rice stocks because many of their laborers are encountering difficulties in reporting to work due to lack of mass transport, strict ECQ checkpoints, problemsin hauling of the grains and difficulties in disposing of rice by-products, such as piling up of rice hulls and low price for rice brans.
These lead to less rice production outputs and rice mill warehouses being filled with palay stocks that cannot be processed properly due to lack of labor force.
To address the problems of rice mill owners processing NFA rice, Dansal said their agency NFA has issued identification cards and COVID-19 Inter-Agency Task Force stickers to rice/palay/ rice by-product haulers.
However, rice mill operators are still complaining that their workers still have a hard time in reporting for duties, hampering the rice milling operations. (PNA)
Comments
Post a Comment