Newly-appointed Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel, Jr. said Monday that it is “not possible” now to fulfill President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s promise of bringing the price of rice down to P20 per kilogram.

“Twenty pesos per kilo was an aspiration. The problem now is that we are on the 15-year high in the world market. So today, that is not possible. But we are the directive of the President to modernize, irrigate, use the right seeds, mechanize, and all that, we are getting ready to do our best to make rice affordable,” said Laurel, a fishing tycoon who was named chief of the Department of Agriculture (DA) last Friday.

“Of course, building, modernizing is not easy…So it might take a little time. But we are planning to do it as fast as possible,” he added.

“It is possible to lower the price, definitely…but we have to have our silos, we have to have our buffer stock, we have to change some laws,” Laurel said, citing that factors such as climate change, El Nino and wars could affect rice prices.

Based on the DA’s price monitoring, local well-milled rice is sold at P45 to P53 while local regular milled rice at P41 to P45, and imported well-milled rice at P45 to P48. Jaspearl Tan/DMS