By Jennifer Catan-Tilos

Dumaguete City (18 July) -- The price of commercial rice in the city's retail market started to fall first week of July which marked a decrease of P1-2 per kilo.

National Food Authority (NFA) Information Officer Rolando Lazalita said the decrease in prices and increase in the volume of rice in the market can be attributed to the massive infusion of government-subsidized rice stocks into the market. Thus, he said, the commercial rice dealers have the option to decrease its price as most of the consumers prefer to line up for cheaper NFA rice.

The NFA official also said more sacks of rice have been released to NFA outlets such as in Dumaguete City Public Market 30 sacks are allocated daily for the Bigasan ni Gloria sa Palengke, another 100 bags to each municipalities and 60 bags for the community-based or barangays weekly in order to saturate the demand of the market.

In Negros Oriental, there are now 74 rice retailers for the Bigasan ni Gloria sa Palengke (BGP), 184 Tindahan Natin retailers in the barangays, 2 local government unit rolling stores, 36 under the legislator/congressional funds, and 26 retailers for Handog sa Parokya program.

The NFA is also eyeing the possibility of increasing the number of retailers for Bigasan sa Barangay under the Barangay Captains in order to avoid situations wherein consumers are congested in some stalls, however, rice allocations in all outlets will be lesser but the distribution is accessible all over the province, Lazalita explained.

The inflow of commercial rice from Mindanao and other regions in the country also contributed to the decline of prices of rice, Lazalita said.

The provincial grains agency has organized the Palengke Watch Team to keep tab of the supply and price of rice in the area. This after the prices skyrocketed that saw thousands of people buying NFA cheap rice.