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🌾 Food Prices DA Bantay Presyo WFP 2000 - Sep 2026

Who Gets The Money For A Kilo Of Rice

Retail rice has nearly tripled since 2000. In the years where the whole chain can be seen, the farmer received under half of what the shopper paid — and a kilo costs 30.5% more in one region than another in the same year.

2.9×
Retail price since 2000
44.6%
Of the retail price reached the farmer
30.5%
Spread between the dearest and cheapest region
21,480
Market price observations
Data Sources
Coverage
2000-2026 monthly nationwide · daily NCR 2019-2026 with a 2022-2024 gap
Tech Stack
Python pdftotext DuckDB Chart.js
Key Takeaways

A national average rice price hides two things that matter more than the average: how little of it reaches the farmer, and how much it varies by where you shop.

  • In 2013, farmgate was 15.36 and retail 34.45 per kilo — the farmer got 44.6%, and across the 5 years where all three prices exist the share never left 43.247.9%.
  • In 2025, rice averaged 56.42 per kilo in Region VII and 43.24 in Region II — a gap of 13.18.
  • Variety matters as much: Rice (special) at 61.42 against Rice (regular, milled) at 47.8. A "rice price" that does not say which rice is not a price.
  • The daily series behind the recent years is built from government PDFs, of which 841 of 2367 parsed — 36%. That is published rather than hidden.

Nearly Tripled In A Generation

Retail rice per kilo, from the WFP market series. The level is the part everyone knows; the sections after it are the parts that are not in the headline.

Retail rice price per kilo, PHP

Retail, 2000
P18.74

Per kilo.

Retail, 2026
P54.37

Nominal pesos, not inflation-adjusted.

Multiple
2.9×

In nominal terms over twenty-six years. The page does not claim this as a real-terms increase.

The Farmer's Share

Farmgate, wholesale and retail for the 5 years where all three were collected. This is the single most useful thing in the dataset and the earlier version of this page did not show it.

Farmgate, wholesale and retail per kilo, PHP

Farmer's share
44.6%

Of the retail price in 2013.

The range
43.2–47.9%

Across every year in the chain. It never reaches half.

Farm to shelf
P19.09

Added between farmgate and retail per kilo, on a farmgate price of P15.36.

Where You Buy It

Mean retail rice by region in 2025, across 83 markets. A national average sits in the middle of a spread this wide and describes nobody in particular.

Mean retail rice price by region, 2025

Dearest region
P56.42

Region VII — per kilo, mean across its markets.

Cheapest region
P43.24

Region II.

Spread
30.5%

P13.18 per kilo between them, in the same year, for retail rice across 17 regions.

Which Rice

WFP tracks 5 distinct rice commodities. They are not interchangeable, and a series that averages across them moves when the reporting mix changes rather than when prices do.

Mean price by rice variety over time, PHP per kilo

Dearest variety
P61.42

Rice (special).

Cheapest variety
P47.8

Rice (regular, milled).

Spread
P13.62

Between the dearest and cheapest variety in the same year — wider than the gap between the dearest and cheapest region.

The Import Premium Closed

Local rice used to sell above imported. The 2019 tariff law replaced import quotas with a duty, and the gap has nearly closed.

Local against imported rice, PHP per kilo

Local, latest
P54.23

Per kilo.

Imported, latest
P53.12

Per kilo.

Remaining premium
P1.11

Local over imported. It was several pesos before the tariff law.

What This Page Does Not Cover

Rice prices, from two sources, at national and regional level. The obvious next questions are not answered here.

Why the margin is what it is

Milling, drying, transport, credit and trader margins all sit between farmgate and shelf. None are in these CSVs, so the page reports the size of the gap and says nothing about who takes which part of it.

Recent farmgate prices

The chain table covers 5 years only, ending in 2013. Farmgate prices are collected by PSA and its portal is not reachable by script, so the farmer's share cannot be brought up to date.

Everything that is not rice

The WFP file holds vegetables, meat, fish and pulses across the same markets — over 200,000 observations. This page is only rice; the rest is unexplored rather than excluded on principle.

Method

Two sources, one derive step, seven CSVs.

Two price series, kept apart

WFP market prices run 2000-2026 and DA Bantay Presyo supplies the daily NCR series from 2018. They are different collections with different coverage and are never spliced into one line.

Only actual prices

The WFP file carries aggregated and forecast rows alongside observations. The rice views filter to priceflag 'actual' and pricetype 'retail'; without that the series mixes measurements with estimates.

Coverage is published

841 of 2367 source PDFs parsed — 36%. The unparsed ones are mostly a layout generation the parser does not handle, and they are listed per document with a status rather than left in a log.

A regex that burned an hour

The Bantay Presyo parser began as one pattern with nested quantifiers and spent 65 minutes of CPU backtracking on wide per-market rows. It now splits fixed-layout rows on runs of two or more spaces, which cannot blow up.

Varieties are not averaged

Five rice commodities are reported separately. Collapsing them into one national price makes the series move when the reporting mix changes.

Verification

Every figure on this page is bound to a query in facts.sql and re-checked on each build; checks.sql adds vocabulary closure and per-series price envelopes.

Key Findings & Summary

  • Retail rice is 2.9 times its 2000 level in nominal pesos, from P18.74 to P54.37 per kilo.
  • The farmer's share of that never reaches half: 43.2 to 47.9% across every year where farmgate, wholesale and retail were all collected.
  • Region matters: P56.42 per kilo in Region VII against P43.24 in Region II in the same year.
  • Variety matters more: P61.42 for Rice (special) against P47.8 for Rice (regular, milled). Any single "price of rice" figure is choosing one of 5 without saying so.
  • The import premium has nearly closed since the 2019 tariff law, to P1.11 per kilo.

Sources & Citations

Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in data/ph-food-prices/. Each is checked against its source query on every build.

Retail and wholesale rice prices by market and variety, 2000-2020 — WFP's market monitoring redistributed by the Humanitarian Data Exchange

Daily NCR retail and wholesale rice prices, 2018 onward — Department of Agriculture daily price bulletins; parsed from PDF