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Rice price hike take a toll on poor families

Even rice farmers in the eastern central Philippines are not exempted from economic hardships brought about by recent staple food price adjustments.

Indeed, the impact of ice price hike is more severe to rice farmers, who earns way less than the minimum wage.  

Manrico Creer, a 41-year-old farm laborer in Tugop village, Tanauan, Leyte province has earned only P50 or $1.16 in one harvest day this week. The amount is just enough to buy a kilogram of rice, which is P45 or $1.05 per kilogram.

In the past three months, the price of this food commodity jumped up to P15 or 35 cents per kilogram.

“One kilogram of rice will not even make me and my wife full since we have 11 children,” said Creer while cutting rice stalks in one sunny morning.

Creer, who has been a rice farmer since he was 12,  is one of the 45 laborers who agreed to join rice harvesting work in a two-hectare farm, owned by his neighbor. Workers get 20% of the trading cost of paddy rice as their pay. They divide the total among themselves.

 “Now that staple food is expensive, there are many times that we just ate rice and lawlaw or cheap vegetables,” he added.

Lawlaw is a fimbriated sardine buried and preserved in salt, commonly eaten by impoverished families who have no other alternative to enhance the taste rice.

Food price adjustment during this period is expected since the country is still experiencing a traditional lean months, according to authorities. Lean month period is the time of year when there low rice harvest.

The National Food Authority (NFA) said rice farmers also buy rice at a high price because “they are also consumers.”

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A trader buys rice grains at P14 or 33 cents per kilogram and sells well-milled rice to retailers at P40 or 93 cents. Retailers then sell the staple food to consumers at P45 or $1.05 per kilogram.

“That’s the nature of rice business and the government cannot control the trade. Farmer’s burden will be lessened if farmers will keep paddy rice, dry it and mill the grains on their own,” said NFA regional information officer Mary Agnes Militante.

Rice is considered as staple food in the Philippines where most people eat rice every meal. In Leyte province alone, every person consumes an average of 117 kilograms each year. (Sarwell Q. Meniano)