THE Department of Agriculture (DA) is predicting that the palay harvest during this wet planting season will yield more than 11 million metric tons (MT). The Bureau of Plant Industry just recently announced that there would be an additional 1.4 million MT of rice this October alone.

With a milling efficiency of 65 percent (on the optimistic side as other agricultural economists claim it to be nearer 60 percent), we theoretically will have a rice inventory of around 6.5 to 7 million MT. Since we consume 35,000 MT of rice per day, multiplying this by 30 means an average monthly consumption of around 1,050,000 MT. This means the predicted rice inventory will be sufficient for around 6 months.