DAVAO, PHILIPPINES - The administration of Philippine president-elect Rodrigo Duterte will aim to make the country self-sufficient in rice production within one to two years, but will still allow imports until the goal is achieved, his spokesman said.
"We will work for rice self sufficiency. But that will not be immediate so we will continue to import if we have a shortfall," spokesman Peter Lavina told Reuters on Friday.
Duterte will become president next month.
Lavina said domestic rice production will be intensified to achieve the self-sufficiency goal, echoing a similar promise by the outgoing administration of President Benigno Aquino, which poured billions of pesos into agriculture.
The Philippines, the world's No. 3 rice buyer, regularly imports more than a million tonnes a year of the food staple to meet demand from its growing population.
"We will develop idle lands, give more support to the agricultural sector, modernise it," Lavina said. "Rice farming can be modernised ... so we can undertake all these measures to increase the productivity of our rice farmers."
A plan by the incumbent government to import an additional 500,000 tonnes of rice this year to beef up state reserves will be reviewed, Lavina said, adding that more transparent government-to-government deals are preferable to allowing private traders to transact shipments.
Under government-to-government transactions the country's National Food Authority (NFA) could only enter into rice supply deals with the governments of the three countries from which it buys rice, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.
Asked how soon the new administration will talk to those countries about supply, Lavina said: "That would be immediate."
Some 500,000 tonnes of rice bought by the NFA from Vietnam and Thailand arrived in the first quarter and the outgoing president has given the agency a standby authority to import an additional 500,000 tonnes if needed.
The country's paddy rice output in the first quarter fell 9.97% from a year ago to 3.9 million tonnes, below the government's forecast of 4.01 million tonnes, amid a crippling drought linked to the El Nino weather phenomenon.