LIBMANAN, Camarines Sur---Strongly reacting to the news story the INQUIRER and the Bicol Mail ran regarding complaints that farmers are hardly benefiting from the government palay procurement program, the regional director of the National Food Authority in Bicol said they have asked the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) Wednesday to investigate “if only to clear matters of fact”.

        Director Edgar S. Bentulan said the investigation the NBI to undertake would determine whether or not the palay stock of the NFA were bought from the farmers or traders, so that he said, those who are guilty will be given “due justice” and those who are not be cleared.

        “Sila na ang bahala magtingin sa amin kung kanino o saan galing ang palay na binibili namin, kung totoo galing sa traders (It’s up to them (NBI) to look into us if who or where the palay we bought came from, if it’s true it came from the traders)” he quipped.

        Bentulan said that the NBI is the competent authority to look into the complaints even as he said they are not hiding anything, and that he said they are “dehado” (disadvantaged) by the issue when in fact they were the ones who “utilized” the municipal agriculture officers (MAOs) to help them in the buying stations of the NFA.

        In the INQUIRER article “DA execs to help farmers sell rice to NFA” published on Sept. 1 that the Bicol Mail published later, Marilyn V. Sta. Catalina, assistant regional director for operations and regulatory of the Department of Agriculture (DA) in Bicol, revealed that Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap has ordered the enlistment of MAOs to help farmers sell their h harvest to the NFA.

        Sta. Catalina said that Yap’s move was prompted by complaints that farmers were not benefiting from the government’s procurement program through the NFA which the MAOs of Camarines Sur have raised.

        The secretary authorized the MAOs to enlist “genuine” farmers in their areas in the palay procurement program by assisting farmer-beneficiaries in the processing of applications for passbooks, the document that qualifies farmers to sell their harvest to the NFA.

        Bentulan retorted that they were expecting the MAOs to be present in their buying stations in the localities but he said they were not around to assist the procurement program of the government.

         “Every time I go to the buying stations they are not reporting, and they are the very people who know the real farmers,” he said.

        Bentulan said the NFA has sent rolling stores to “appease” the farmers back-to-back with their delivery trucks to get their harvest “free of charge”.

        He said they have increased the palay buying target for the six provinces of Bicol from the original target of 342,000 bags to 802,600 bags, July to December, which will cost the government some P300 million, an all over the region the NFA has already bought 170,000 bags from July to August.

        Bentulan said that they are encouraging farmers to sell their harvest dried so that they avail of the high-price of P17/kilo in the 14 buying stations and 10 mobile procurement teams in all Bicol provinces. The average buying price of palay in the region is P14/kilo, he added.

         In a press release given to the INQUIRER, the NFA director was said to have “mobilized the agency’s resources to review farmers’ documents in application for passbook and other papers in a bid to ‘cleanse’ the NFA’s palay buying operations.”

        It said that the master list of members of farmers’ cooperatives will be revalidated with the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA), including landholding, production and actual ownership of land which will be verified with the MAO.

         “NFA has now tapped the presence of the Municipal Agricultural Officers in its buying stations to deter traded palay creeping-in to the agency’s procurement,” according to the NFA press release entitled “Traders, get off our procurement---NFA”.

        It added that big truckloads of palay deliveries will be certified first by MAO or in the absence the stocks will be verified at source.

        Bentulan warned that any farmer or farmer cooperative found being used by traders will be immediately stripped of the farmer’s passbook or master passbook, and that they would be perpetually backlisted to sell palay produce to the NFA.