3 - Impact of COVID-19 on the Philippine Rice Sector

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Paddy rice is the most widely grown crop in the Philippines, the thirteenth most populous country in the world, and a world top-ten producer of the commodity. Milled rice is likewise the nation's main staple, accounting for 35 per cent of the average calorie intake of the population. Historically, rice has played a significant role in the culture of most Filipinos; the word “rice” is the same as the word “eat” in some of the country's major languages. It was perhaps inevitable that the commodity would become heavily politicized: maintaining its affordability for the consumer while safeguarding the livelihoods of the paddy rice farmer are seen by the populace as key benchmarks of a competent government.

The Philippines has also been historically a rice importer. A net rice exporter engaging in a few thousand tons of external trade in the 1850s and 1860s, the nation became a chronic rice importer since the 1870s. Net annual imports were typically in the 50,000 to 100,000-ton range in the 1880s and 1890s (with an interregnum due to the Philippine Revolution and Philippine-American War from 1896 to the early 1900s). In the 1900snet annual imports ranged from 100,000 to 300,000 tons. One reason for the rice deficit in the country is inconsistent rainfall in Luzon, the northern island group that hosts the country's “rice bowl”, in contrast to the “great river deltas of the Southeast Asian mainland” (Doeppers 2016, p. 64). By the late twentieth century average annual imports were 380,000 tons, and by the twenty-first century the average was 1.4 million tons (FAO 2022). Such a persistent trade tendency can only be explained not by vagaries of policy, governance, land use, and so on, but rather by the fundamental features of geography (Dawe 2006).

Rather than accepting economic reality, successive governments since the 1930s have instead acted to reserve the local market for domestically produced rice, placing imports under strict government control, while supporting paddy rice production with public funds (Briones 2018). The regime of import control intensified in the 1970s and successfully withstood all efforts at reform; it was only in 2019 that the government finally liberalized the rice industry, including the decision to import rice, albeit still subject to high tariffs.