BY JOB REALUBIT

AGRICULTURE Secretary Arthur Yap on Saturday gave the assurance there is no rice shortfall but said consumers should expect a hike in prices due to tight global demand.

Yap maintained there will be no food crisis as rice production is well on track.

"We are going to enter the dry season harvest. The DA expects to surpass the 6.8 million-ton production of the first semester of 2007," he said.

There were reports the country might experience a rice production shortfall by as much as 500,000 metric tons because Vietnam agreed to ship only one million metric tons of rice instead of 1.5 million MT.

Yap said the National Food Authority has in stock 500,000 metric tons of rice imported last December, and coupled with the summer rice harvests, the country has enough stock even with the Vietnam scale-down.

Market analysts, however, have warned of a likely sharp drop in the summer harvests because of the unseasonal rains that have damaged plantings in the Visayas and Mindoro.

In Panay island, a surplus producer, early harvests were down in some places by 50 percent because of heavy rains.

The rains were blamed on the La Niña phenomenon which weathermen say could last the whole of the traditional dry season.

Valerie Guarnieri, UN World Food Program country director, last week said hunger incidence in the Philippines might escalate due to the increasing price of rice.

But Yap said they are poised to adopt measures that will dampen the impact of rice price increases on the poor.

His ace in the hole is NFA rice which he said will be sold only to the very needy.