The Rice Got Cheaper for Traders. Not for You.

In 2019 the government changed the rice rules. Before that, only a state agency could bring in most foreign rice. After that, any trader could, if they paid a tax at the border.

The idea was simple. Let more rice in. Prices go down. Families pay less.

Half of that happened.

Where the Data Came From

I used two sources.

The first is the World Food Programme, shared through a site called HDX. It holds 25,624 rice price records for the Philippines, from the year 2000 to 2026. It is the only free source I found that tracks all three steps: what the farmer gets, what the trader pays, and what you pay.

The second is our own Department of Agriculture. They check market prices every single day. But they only publish it as PDF files. So I wrote a small program to read them. It pulled 7,586 prices from 836 days.

The Long Climb

In 2000, a kilo of rice cost about 18 pesos and 74 centavos. In 2026 it costs about 54 pesos and 37 centavos.

The biggest single jump came in 2008. That year food prices rose all over the world. Rice here went from 24 pesos to almost 32 in one year.

And it never came back down. That is the part people forget. A price shock does not undo itself. It just becomes the new normal, and the next rise starts from there.

The Part That Surprised Me

Now the main finding.

There are two prices for rice. The wholesale price is what a shop owner pays to buy rice in bulk. The retail price is what you pay in the market. Retail is always higher. That gap pays for trucks, storage, and the seller's living.

For nineteen years that gap was steady. From 2000 to 2018, retail sat between 5% and 14% above wholesale. The average was 10%.

Then the new rice law started in March 2019.

The law worked on wholesale. Traders paid 38.47 pesos a kilo in 2018. By 2020 they paid 30.95. That is a drop of about 20 in every 100 pesos.

But in the market, the price fell from 41.43 to 37.46. That is a drop of only about 10 in every 100.

So the rice got much cheaper for the people buying it in bulk. It got a little cheaper for you. About half the savings stopped somewhere in between.

I want to be careful here. This data does not tell me who kept that money, or why. Costs for trucks and fuel went up in those years too. What the data does say is that the gap widened, it widened a lot, and it did not go back.

One Grade, Not All Rice

A quick note on how I checked this.

Rice comes in many grades. Fancy, premium, well milled, regular milled. If shops report more fancy rice one year and more cheap rice the next, the average price moves even when nothing really changed.

So for the gap study I used only one grade: regular milled. Same grade, every year. That way the change is real and not a trick of the mix.

Imported and Local Now Cost the Same

Here is one more thing from the daily data.

Local rice used to cost more than imported rice. In September 2026 the two are almost equal. Premium local costs 54.23 pesos. Premium imported costs 53.12. That is about one peso apart.

At the cheaper regular grade, local rice is now slightly less than imported.

That sounds like good news for shoppers. It may not be good news for farmers. If local rice has to match the price of imported rice, then the money a farmer takes home is pushed down too.

What I Could Not Do

I have to be honest about a hole in this work.

The daily price files changed shape in late 2021. For about three years the Department of Agriculture published them as picture-style layouts, with numbers in little boxes instead of neat rows. My program cannot read those.

So out of 2,367 daily files, I could only read 841. The years 2022 and 2023 are missing from the daily part entirely.

The long yearly view still covers those years, because the World Food Programme data does. But on the daily chart you will see a real gap, and I left it as a gap. I did not draw a line across it and pretend.

I keep a second file that lists every single PDF and whether I could read it. That way anyone checking my work can see exactly what is missing.

What I'd Do Differently

I want the farm gate price. That is what the farmer actually receives. The data has it only for 2008 to 2013, which is too short to say much.

With that, you could follow one peso all the way through: farmer, trader, shop, you. Right now I can only see the last two steps clearly.