[Analysis] In response to Raul Montemayor’s piece on the Rice Tariffication Law (Rappler)

Rappler published an article on the RTL. For more than 30 years with the Quantitative Restrictions regime, the rice economy hardly developed despite the Department of Agriculture (DA) spending more than half of its budget to prop it up, Filipino consumers paying higher prices for rice than their ASEAN counterparts, and rent-seeking activities continuing to bedevil the implementation of the QR regime. The works of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS) and IFPRI to support his argument, noting that both studies predicted a contraction in areas devoted to palay cultivation as a result of RTL in the medium- and long-term. He is right on this. What he is not telling us is that both the PIDS and IFPRI studies are not saying that this is a bad development per se, as it opens up opportunities for crop diversification, wherein farmers can gain higher income.