National Food Authority (NFA) Administrator Angelito Banayo announced recently that the NFA council is finalizing the government-to-government deal to purchase 100,000 metric tons (MT) of rice from Vietnam to boost its buffer stock of the staple during the lean months – that is between July and September.

In the first quarter of this year, Vietnamese businesses signed commercial contracts to ship 500,000 tons of rice to the Philippines this year.

The 100,000 tons was part of 120,000 tons allotted to the authority, while private traders and farmer groups will import the other 380,000 tons.

The government also plans to buy 20,000 MT of rice from Cambodia under a similar government-to-government contract to fill the 120,000-MT requirement.

While we used to import rice from Thailand, this time around, like last year, Vietnam and Cambodia offered cheaper price in the market. In 2011, the Philippines bought rice worth over P4 billion from Vietnam.

According to NFA the government needs to boost the rice supply in its warehouses this month to keep the supply and prices stable when the lean months set in.

The Philippines usually does not produce much rice between the months of July and September. As of today, the country’s buffer stock is good only for 22 days.

Banayo said the NFA warehouses must have a 30-day rice inventory by the end of June.

Statistics from the Bureau of Agricultural shows that the country’s total rice inventory as of April 1 was 2.64 million MT. This was 31.1 percent higher than the March inventory, but 14.4 percent lower than last year’s 3.08 million MT.

In the first three months of the year, the Department of Agriculture said, palay harvest was slightly lower at 3.99 million MT compared to the record-breaking harvest of 4.037 million MT in the same period last year.

Though the country expects a bountiful harvest in the second quarter, still it cannot sustain the population’s needs.

Having the above scenario, one can’t help but ask: Why can’t the Philippines be self-sufficient in rice anymore, when we used to be, and be dependent instead from the production of other Southeast Asian countries, like Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and even Myanmar?

What comes to mind immediately, and ironically, is that the present Southeast Asian granaries got their technology from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), whose headquarters are based in Los Baños, Laguna, Philippines, and whose main goal is to find sustainable ways to improve the well-being of poor rice farmers and consumers, as well as the environment.

So, what has gone wrong? Are our farmers gone lackadaisical?

Well, not really. Study shows that farmers in the various rice bowls of Asia found that Filipino farmers were among the leaders in reducing insecticide use, and have progressed farther in mechanizing land preparation and post harvest operations than their counterparts in any other developing Asian country except Thailand.

So, is it politics, faulty government policy, corruption, conversion of rice land to other uses, deteriorating irrigation systems, and lack of farm credit?

I don’t think the Philippines have the monopoly of all these problems. If we have them, they have them, too, for sure.

The telling difference lies in the fact that present exporters occupy river deltas with lots of land in general, and lots of land suitable for rice in particular. These countries are all located in mainland Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar.

They say that Thailand has about four times the quantity of arable land per person as the Philippines. Consistent importers, like what is happening to the Philippines, have less arable land per person and more varied landscapes favoring such alternatives as corn, oil palm, or coconut. The same condition exist in island countries like Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and even Japan.

Added to this is the Philippine location off the eastern edge of the Asian continent, where the country bears the brunt of numerous typhoons, making rice production more difficult and risky.

Being fatalistic in the belief that we could no longer bring back the 60s and the 70s, where the country used to be self-sufficient in rice and even exported some, is there a mitigating factor where the country could save a little by importing less rice?

Of course there is – tell the Catholic church not to meddle with government affairs and let the politicians in congress pass the Reproductive Health (RH) bill or what is better known as the Responsible Parenthood (RP) bill.

Population growth in the Philippines is still above 2% per annum, much higher than in neighboring developing countries. This is what is adding to the country’s woes.