Advanced New Year’s gift: Rice farmers get more aid from Department of Agriculture

Three days after Christmas, rice farmer Marison Piloy went down the hills where his farm is located in the remote village of Tio-Angan in Bagulin, La Union to receive forage choppers, trowels, sprinklers, and mineral blocks (for livestock) from field officials of the Department of Agriculture (DA).

Piloy was among 1,791 rice farmers who journeyed to the town center to accept the farm inputs under the livelihood projects of the DA’s Special Area for Agricultural Development (SAAD) Program Phase 2.

To their pleasant surprise, Piloy and his neighbors from Sitio Sinabugan also received cash cards that would allow them to withdraw the P5,000 unconditional cash transfer from excess tariffs collected in the implementation of the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL).

“We didn’t expect to receive our cash card today. It was nice to have something to buy for farm equipment like fertilizer and so on. Thank you for the continued support of the DA to us. Since SAAD, our farm life has become easier as there are more cows in Sinabugan. We even use farm machinery in the fields,” Piloy, a member of the Sinabugan Farmers’ Association, remarked in Ilocano.

Officially called the Interventions Monitoring Cards (IMC) for the Rice Competitiveness Enhancement Fund-Rice Farmers Financial Assistance (RCEF-RFFA), the cash cards are being distributed to an estimated 2.4 million rice farmers tilling two hectares of land and below.

The RFFA is an unconditional financial assistance to farmers funded by excess tariff collection from rice importations in 2022 that total P12 billion. The 2023 RFFA beneficiaries include farmers that registered in the Registry System for Basic Sectors in Agriculture as of June 30, 2023.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. has approved the release of P12 billion RFFA ahead of the New Year celebrations to help rice farmers “cope with the increasing cost of production and sustain their productivity even in the face of challenges like the coming El Niño.”

To implement the President’s instructions, the DA has tapped the Development Bank of the Philippines to distribute the funds. The state-owned bank, in turn, engaged homegrown fintech firm USCC, formerly RCPI, to use its over