Section 1 of PD 1211 points way to rice sufficiency

There is a pledge which National Food Authority (NFA) employees are obliged to recite every first Monday of the month, after the flag-raising ceremony. The pledge is entitled “Panatang Makapalay,” which is just plain sloganeering and does not really address the insufficient supply of rice to feed the ever-increasing rice-eating Filipinos.

How can the employees pledge to eat brown rice or even regular milled rice when the rice allowance they receive from the agency is well-milled, sometimes mixed with expired iron fortificants?

Our leaders should read the article written by Cielito F. Habito, a Cabinet secretary in the Ramos presidency, which was published in the Inquirer on July 17, 2012. The NFA administrator should then just implement the provision of Section 1 of Presidential Decree No. 1211 which states: “The milling of over-milled rice (rice with all the bran removed) is hereby prohibited. All rice mill owners/operators are required to mill a minimum of 10 percent of all palay owned and/or received by them for milling into brown rice (rice with only the hull removed) and the balance into regular milled rice only.”

I am sure that if we require all rice millers to mill their palay into regular milled rice only (in compliance with PD 1211), we will attain that elusive rice sufficiency for our country. This will mean an additional rice recovery of around 510,000 metric tons of regular milled rice or at least 10 million bags of regular milled rice recovery (3 percent of 17 million rice paddy production). Likewise, by requiring all rice millers to mill their palay into regular milled rice only, it will be much easier to determine smuggled rice in the market since smuggled rice are mostly, if not all, well-milled.

—JOSE TAGANAHAN,

joe_taganahan@yahoo.com