URDANETA—Although a leading rice producer in the province, this city is not taking the looming rice crisis lightly with the traditional lean months ahead.
Mayor Amadeo Perez Jr. met with farmer leaders last week to personally urge them to save part of their produce for the lean months even as he urged all households to begin planting vegetables in their vacant lots.
In that meeting, Perez gave the go-signal for farmers in well-irrigated areas to plant third crop rice to boost the available stock.
He said a third harvest cropping can help stabilize the price of rice as he pointed out that one of the problems lies in the practice of farmers quickly selling all their produce each harvest.
Perez said that buyers from as far as Nueva Ecija come to Urdaneta to buy palay offering P19.50 per kilo, compared with prevailing rates of P18.50 to P19, just to entice farmers to sell all their produce.
He advised farmers “to be wiser and smarter as the food crisis has just started,” he said, pointing to the unabated spiraling prices of commercial rice.
The city government will soon buy hybrid vegetable seeds to boost the seeds produced by the city nursery for distribution to all households.
“If we want to survive the impending food crisis, we must produce our own food right in our homes and backyards,” he said.
At the same time, Perez said he has proposed to the National Food Authority (NFA) to sell the cheaper NFA rice directly to indigent families in six selected barangays of the city.
He said under this arrangement, each indigent family identified by the barangay chair can buy at least three kilos of rice at P18.50 per kilo.—LM
Source: http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/2008/04/20/urdaneta-city-readies-for-looming-food-crisis/
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