The Department of Agriculture (DA) has approved the release and sale of 490,000 sacks of National Food Authority rice to beneficiaries of the Department of Social Welfare and Development’s “Walang Gutom” Program (WGP), at P20 per kilo, from June to December 2025.
DSWD Secretary Rex Gatchalian, in a briefing in Malacañang on Tuesday, June 3, said DA Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. informed him on Monday of the DA’s willingness to supply the WGP accredited retailers and stores with the P20/kg rice so these can be bought by the DSWD beneficiaries.
The DA confirmed it approved the request of the DSWD for 490,000 sacks of rice from the National Food Authority (NFA) from June to December this year.
“It is actually the DA that should be thanking the DSWD for helping move a significant portion of our stocks. This clears space in our warehouses and allows us to buy more palay from local farmers at fair prices,” Tiu Laurel said.
Gatchalian said the DSWD has submitted to the DA a list of 1,000 accredited retailers and agricultural cooperatives where the P20/kg rice would be delivered and purchased by the DSWD beneficiaries. “They (DA) are now going to make sure that around 1,000 retailers will receive the affordable rice, which they can supply to our food-poor beneficiaries,” Gatchalian said in mixed English and Filipino.
He said the current food voucher holders can only avail of the P20/kg rice at the Kadiwa ng Pangulo centers. Under the WGP, food-poor families are each given a P3,000-food voucher monthly, which they can use to purchase nutritious food from the Kadiwa and accredited retailers and food markets.
The program, set to run until 2027, currently benefits 300,000 poor families.
The coverage of the program is targeted to expand to 750,000 poor families by the end of 2027.
The DA, in a statement, said the rice, which would be sourced to the NFA, could also be used in the relief operations of the DSWD.
The NFA currently has more than 8 million sacks of rice in storage, a volume nearing its capacity.
The DA said “offloading rice for the DSWD and the P20/kilo rice program, a flagship initiative of the Marcos administration, helps sustain the palay procurement of the NFA and ensures continued farmer support and consumer relief.”
Gatchalian said the hunger incidence has significantly dropped among the beneficiaries of the WGP, as shown by the results of the hunger survey by the Social Weather Station (SWS) and GlobeTelecom.
SWS said that it conducted surveys from Oct. 7 to 18, 2024 and on Dec. 1 to 10, 2024, which covered 3,991 respondents from 33 provinces across the country. It found that the hunger incidence among the WGP household beneficiaries dropped by 4.1 percentage points — from 48.7 percent in October 2024 to 44.6percent in December.
The drop has been steep in the cities and provinces where the program was implemented such as Negros Oriental and Negros Occidental in the Visayas, and Cotabato City, Zamboanga del Norte, and Surigao del Norte in Mindanao.
The SWS said hunger prevalence among areas that were not covered at the time by the “Walang Gutom” Program increased over the same period by 6.1 points.
“We are pleased to note this favorable result of the nationwide impact evaluation conducted by the SWS. This indicates that the impact of the WGP is indeed felt on the ground by no less than our beneficiaries. With this positive development, we will continue to develop ways to make the program more responsive to the needs of the beneficiaries,” Gatchalian said.
The WGP, adopted as a flagship program of the Marcosadministration through Executive Order No. 44, aims to bring down the incidence of involuntary hunger experienced by Filipinos from low-income households; promotes social and behavioral change among food-poor families by teaching them how to prepare nutritious,delicious, and affordable meals; and encourage the beneficiaries to find work to be able to sustainably support their families.
In its statement on Tuesday, the DA lauded the move by the DSWD, saying it will bolster the welfare agency’s disaster response and feeding programs for vulnerable communities nationwide.
The DSWD has said it requires 35,000 sacks of rice monthly to keep its repacking hubs in Pasay and Cebu operational. The agency is among government bodies that regularly sources its rice from the NFA for social support programs.
Under the Rice Tariffication Law that was enacted in 2019, the NFA is mandated to maintain up to a 15-day rice buffer stock sourced from local farmers to be used only for calamities and emergencies.
The NFA can only publicly sell rice stocks before they age or milled rice that has been stored for at least two months since processing.
Based on the DA’s monitoring of public markets in the National Capital Region, local well-milled rice sold for P38 to P48 per kg on Monday (June 2) while regular milled rice went for P33 to P42 per kg.
Imported well-milled rice was selling for P40 to P48 per kg while the price of imported regular-milled rice ranged from P35 to P45 per kg.
