Even if President Rodrigo Duterte wants the National Food Authority (NFA) to maintain a 60-day buffer stock or “fill its warehouses to the roof, the reality that the state-run grains agency can’t even sustain inventory level good for 15 days still remains. An NFA official said what Duterte wants the agency to do will not happen anytime soon, as even the officials of Department of Agriculture (DA) are still discussing how to implement it more than a month since the order was made. If the government will push for 60-day buffer stocking, it would need to maintain 1.9 million metric tons (MT) of rice at any given time. Meanwhile, the NFA announced yesterday that rice imports will start arriving on or before the end of this month that will enable the agency to flood the market with rice priced at between P27 and P32 per kilogram.