Agriculture Secretary Francisco P. Tiu Laurel Jr. on Tuesday stressed the urgency for the Department of Agriculture (DA) to intensify its efforts in sustaining the country’s decelerating inflation trend.

The Philippine Statistics Authority reported that inflation eased to 0.9 percent in July, a six-year low. This deceleration was helped by continued reductions in food prices. Notably, the prices of rice and corn—key staples in the consumer basket—fell by 15.9 percent year-on-year.

This favorable development provides the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas with greater flexibility to reduce interest rates, potentially stimulating economic growth and job creation.

“Now that we’ve helped lower inflation, the DA’s next challenge is to tackle rice and pork issues to keep food inflation in check,” Secretary Tiu Laurel said.

On July 16, the DA reduced the maximum suggested retail price (MSRP) of 5 percent broken imported rice to P43 from P45 per kilo. This move, along with President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s decision last year to cut rice import tariffs from 35 percent to 15 percent, has helped bring retail rice prices down from over P60 per kilo.

Tiu Laurel also said the government is working to rein in persistently high pork prices, which remain elevated due to domestic supply constraints caused by African Swine Fever (ASF).

To address this, the administration is pushing for the commercial availability of an ASF vaccine by year-end and adjusting pork import policies to help ease high retail prices of pork products.

President Marcos is now mulling suspending rice import and raising tariff to protect local farmers from the excess importation of the food staple. ### (Photo by Joseph Henry Elamparo, DA-AFID, January 2025)