Philippines, the world's largest rice importer despite being among the biggest rice producers in the globe, trading globally a less than 10% of world production.

The government has been buying rice and other food from international market with high prices and providing the country's poor with subsidized rice, sold to official stores run by the National Food Authority (NFA) and guarded by the military.

And while some Filipino economists believe that rice prices may fall by 50% by the year-end, Philippine official said that the prices of rice will go down in the coming weeks as newly-harvested "palay" from central and northern luzon start to come into market.

An official of NFA stated that the price of palay has started to normalize with the influx of fresh supplies following the summer harvest. It was because our country is heading to its reaping season when rice takes just 5-6 months to grow and is harvested 2x a year.

Just recently I heard that price of palay has dropped to 14 to 15 pesos (3.4 to 3.6 U.S dollar) per kilogram from 20 pesos last week, sounds good.

Our economists said that the current situation is caused by the supply-demand inbalance. That means, the world consumption is now slightly ahead of world production.

And so for now, Philippines have no choice but to buy whatever quantities are available in the world market-even at a higher price.

Meanwhile, the food price in the Philippines provide points of civil disorder more explosive than the three coup attempts since 2003, three impeachments attempts against President Arroyo and several calls for "people power" to force her to resign. None of these disturbances had anything to do with inflationary prices of food and hunger. The government has allocated P5 billion in subsidies to 300,000 poor Filipino families in the 20 poorest provinces to enable them to cope with high prices in addition to the three kilos of subsidized rice at NFA outlets.