December 12, 2024 | 12:00am
MANILA, Philippines — The country’s rice self-sufficiency ratio (SSR) recovered to 78.5 percent last year, following a 24-year low of 77 percent in 2022, as a result of lower imports and higher domestic output.
Assistant National Statistician Rachel Lacsa disclosed the latest rice SSR figure during a recent hearing of the quinta committee of the House of Representatives, also known as the Murang Pagkain super committee.
The SSR measures the extent that the country’s supply for a specific commodity or good comes from its own domestic production.
Lacsa pointed out that a lower SSR would mean that “domestic production is insufficient to meet total domestic needs.”
“(It means that) 78.5 percent of total (rice) supply in 2023 came from domestic production and the other 21.5 percent came from rice imports,” she said.
It was the third year in the past six years that the country’s rice SSR was below 80 percent.
Government officials and industry stakeholders attributed the slight increase in rice SSR last year to higher rice production coupled by reduced import volume.
The country’s milled rice production last year reached a record-level of 13.119 million metric tons (MT), according to Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) data.
Meanwhile, total rice imports fell to 3.59 million MT from 3.851 million MT in 2022.
“The climate conditions prevailing in 2023 is way better than this year which will explain a higher food sufficiency ratio,” Philippine Chamber of Agriculture and Food Inc. president Danilo Fausto told The STAR.
However, Fausto cautioned that certain parameters used by the PSA need urgent review as they might be outdated already.
For example, the PSA still uses a palay-to-rice conversion ratio of 65.4 percent, which is not representative of the realities on the ground, he pointed out. Fausto noted that the average conversion ratio of rice millers nationwide is now below 65 percent.
Furthermore, Fausto said the inclusion of imports in the sufficiency formula could “misled” the public regarding the actual food production performance of the country.
Critics have been questioning the use of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture (FAO) formula by the PSA in measuring the SSR because it excludes the demand data.
“If imports go down as in 2023, the SSR will go up but it does not mean that we became more self-sufficient. [The formula should be] demand divided by local production only,” Raul Montemayor of the Federation of Free Farmers said.
Even during the House hearing, Rep. Joey Salceda of Albay asked Lacsa why the demand is not included in the SSR formula to which the PSA official replied that the statistical agency follows the FAO formula.
“It is so counter intuitive,” Salceda responded.
Lacsa also presented the country’s rice demand-supply ratio upon the request of the House super committee. Based on the PSA estimates, the country had a rice demand-supply ratio of 82.5 percent last year, higher than the 81.4 percent in 2022.
The figure represents the volume of rice supply that was actually consumed in a given year.
“(It shows that) 82.5 percent of our (rice) supply was utilized or consumed in 2023. The remaining 18.5 percent was buffer stocks or beginning stocks of the (following) year,” Lacsa explained.
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