General Santos City

Pandemic rice aid rotting in General Santos City gym

Rommel Rebollido

This is AI generated summarization, which may have errors. For context, always refer to the full article.

Pandemic rice aid rotting in General Santos City gym

RICE STOCKS. A cat walks past sacks of rice waiting to be distributed in General Santos. Photo by Rommel Rebollido/Rappler

Rommel Rebollido/Rappler

(1st UPDATE) The city government says only '20 to 30 sacks of rice were listed as 'damaged' and not 'rotting' and 'still safe for human consumption'

Hundreds of sacks of rice intended as food aid to the needy when General Santos City implemented stringent quarantine measures in 2020 have remained undistributed, exposed to the elements, and rotting in a public gymnasium in the city.

General Santos city hall executive assistant Jose Kevin Sienes said a recent inventory of the local government’s rice stocks showed there were about less than a thousand sacks of rice left at the the local government-owned Lagao gymnasium.

Some of the sacks of rice showed signs of rot, prompting city hall workers to repack their contents to remove the grains that were no longer fit for human consumption, Sienes said. 

The damage, he said, was due to poor handling and environmental factors, and the city government’s lack of capability and appropriate storage facilities for huge rice stocks.

But even during the rice distribution in 2020, several residents complained of receiving rotten rice from the local government.

Sienes explained that thousands of sacks of rice that the city government bought last year were originally stored in a warehouse of the National Food Authority (NFA) but these were later moved to the gymnasium in Barangay Lagao after a memorandum of agreement between city hall and NFA expired in December 2020.

“Nabuot ang anaa sa ilawom, unya gibalhin ang uban sa gawas sa gym, gibutangan og trapal. Apan tungod sa kusog nga ulan na-ambihan mao nga aduna na usab nadaut,” he said.

(The rotten grains were mostly those at the bottom because some of these were placed outside the gym and covered with a tarp. When it rained, some got wet and were damaged.)

Sienes said city hall workers sorted the grains which they thought could still be eaten and repacked these for distribution.

The rice stocks were part of the 7,200 metric tons bought by the city government in late April 2020. The delivery, amounting to P305 million, consisted of 288,000 sacks of rice at 25 kilograms each.

General Santos Mayor Ronnel Rivera said city hall opted to buy imported rice because the NFA had limited stocks at that time. He also said that the NFA agreed to allow the imported rice to be stored in its warehouse along with 6,000 bags of rice that city hall earlier bought from NFA.

In 2020, Rivera said the rice would be given to 169,000 households in two batches in May and June 2020, to help them cope with the impact of the quarantine measures.

Rivera has sought P20 million more to augment city hall’s rice stocks, a request questioned by Councilor Franklin Gacal, former chairman of the city council’s finance committee.

Assistant City Administrator Voltaire Tiu said they sought additional budget because the remaining stocks at the Lagao gymnasium were about to be exhausted and would need to be replenished.

City government responds

The city government addressed the issue a day later, on August 21, and denied that the rice stocks were “rotting.”

“Sa kabuuan ng relief operations simula March 2020 hanggang August 2021, sa mahigit kumulang 300,000 sacks ng bigas na nabili ng LGU GenSan, mayroon 20 hanggang 30 sacks na nalista bilang ‘damaged’ at hindi ito ‘rotting’ o nabubulok. Ito ay kinukunsidera pa din na ‘safe for human consumption,” the city government said in a statement accompanied by a video on its official Facebook page.

(During the entire relief operations from March 2020 to August 2021, of the more or less 300,000 sacks of rice that the GenSan LGU purchased, 20 to 30 sacks were listed as “damaged” and not “rotting.” It is still considered “safe for human consumption.)

Rappler.com

Rommel Rebollido is a Mindanao-based journalist and an awardee of the Aries Rufo Journalism Fellowship

Add a comment

Sort by

There are no comments yet. Add your comment to start the conversation.

Summarize this article with AI

How does this make you feel?

Loading
Download the Rappler App!