JONG CADION
Chief of reporters
Corn supply in the province will most probably land a 15 percent low this coming September harvest, Department of Agriculture (DA) regional executive director Oscar Parawan said.
Parawan attributes the cause to high fertilizer prices which kept farmers from planting more of the crop this season.
He said he got the information from the Bureau of Agricultural Statistics (BAS), which released a report predicting a reduction of corn planting in the second quarter of this year.
Definitely, it is the effect of high cost of fertilizer for corn, reiterates the DA official, but in relation to farmers’ intention to plant, “they are still willing.”
Parawan is set to look for possibilities of having a fertilizer subsidy to address the problem.
It was also learned that corn price in the market now also increased to P40 a kilo.
There were reports reaching this paper which said that farmers have opted to divert planting to other agricultural crops instead of corn due to the high price of fertilizers.
The situation could be blamed to the government, as it only concentrated in the rice problem forgetting the equally important corn.
Well, on second thought, we could also blamed the unscrupulous traders who took advantage of the situation and jacked up their prices as if there’s no tomorrow.
“How can we survive with this kind of situation if our yield can’t compensate the high cost of production?” farmer George Borres of Sta. Cruz, Labangan asked this paper.
Parawan, in admitting government neglect and complacency, said that the government was more determined in rice importation rather that exportation.
“Some tell us that the Thailanders and Vietnamese are better of than Filipino farmers. That’s not true. Filipino farmers are better farmers than those in Thailand and Vietnam because we have the higher yield per hectares, they are just lucky because they have bigger irrigated land area,” Parawan told journalists.
“And we have that technology of seeds that can yield 10 percent higher than that of other rice-producing countries,” he added.