By ANNA FELICIA BAJO and TED CORDERO, GMA Integrated News

Around this time last year, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. opened his third State of the Nation Address (SONA) not with his administration’s feats, but with the daunting reality check that the fruits of economic progress were not felt by ordinary Filipinos faced with the rising prices of commodities—particularly rice.

“The hard lesson of this last year has made it very clear that whatever current data proudly bannering our country as among the best-performing in Asia, means nothing to a Filipino, who is confronted by the price of rice at 45 to 65 pesos per kilo,” Marcos said in his report to the nation on Monday, July 22, 2024.

“Bagamat maganda ang mga istatistikang ito, wala itong kabuluhan sa ating kababayan na hinaharap ang realidad na mataas ang presyo ng mga bilihin, lalo na ang pagkain—lalo’t higit, ng bigas,” the President said.

(Although the statistics are good, these mean nothing to our countrymen who face the reality of high prices of goods, especially food, and most especially, rice.)

With this, Marcos declared “hindi tayo titigil sa paglalaban sa kahirapan, at sa paghahanap ng lunas upang maibalik sa normal ang presyo ng bilihin—lalo na ang bigas [we will not stop in battling poverty and finding solutions to normalize the prices of goods—especially rice.]”

IBON Foundation executive director Sonny Africa told GMA News Online that the President opened his 2024 SONA “well, with the acknowledgement that the majority of Filipinos aren’t feeling any benefits from hyped economic growth.”

“If sincere, this could’ve signaled a reorientation of economic policy to favor poor and middle-class Filipinos instead of the narrowest slice of rich families and large corporations at the very top,” Africa said.

The President will once again face the nation to deliver his report on July 28, 2025—halfway through his term.

GMA News Online looked at what the Marcos administration has so far accomplished in terms of fulfilling the chief executive’s promise to lower inflation and rice prices.

Inflation

Data from the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed that inflation—which measures the rate of growth in consumer goods and services costs—slowed down to 3.2%, well within the government’s ceiling of 2% to 4%, from 6% in 2023.

The PSA attributed the full-year 2024 inflation decline to the downtrend in food and non-alcoholic beverages at 4.4%  from 7.9% in 2023 as well as the lower print seen in electricity, gas and other fuels at 1.7% from 4.9% year-on-year.

As of end-June 2025, inflation rate cooled down further to 1.8%.

Also in June this year, food inflation—which tracks the price movements of food items in a “basket” commonly purchased by households—eased to 0.1% from 0.7% in May and from 6.5% in June of last year. 

This was on the back of a steeper deflation in rice at -14.3% from -12.8% in May.

Rice prices

Rice inflation has been contracting for six months in a row and is seen to end the year at a “negative inflation” print, consistent with the PSA’s expectation that it would begin easing towards the second half of 2024 due to base effects, particularly when it began its uptrend in August 2023, as well as the impact of lower rice import tariff which took effect early July last year.

In the third year of his presidency, Marcos was able to fulfill his campaign promise of lowering the price of rice to P20 per kilo in a bid to ease the burden of consumers on the increasing price of one of Filipinos’ basic food commodities. 

Initially launched in the Visayas region last April, at least 162 locations across the country have been offering the cheaper subsidized rice, according to the Department of Agriculture. 

Members of the vulnerable sectors are on the priority list of who can avail the P20 per kilo of rice. 

The P20-per-kilo rice initiative operates primarily through KADIWA ng Pangulo outlets. The rice is being sourced from stocks of the National Food Authority, which are procured directly from local farmers.

The subsidized rice program not only ensures affordable food staple for consumers but also helps decongest NFA warehouses. Moreover, this will make space to purchase more palay at prices higher than those offered by private traders.

Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. said the target is to serve 15 million households or about 60 million people by the end of 2026. 

The DA also vowed to intensify the implementation of industry recovery and expansion programs, such as the Swine Industry Recovery Project (SIRP) and Livestock Economic Enterprise Development, to strengthen food supply chains. 

IBON Foundation’s Africa, however, said programs of the administration “will all be tokenistic and exaggerated public relations efforts if the government does not commit budgets, resources and energy commensurate to the magnitude of the problems at hand.”

“The President spoke about supporting agriculture but, if anything, the smaller share of the sector in the 2025 budget to 3.9% of the total from 4.1% in 2024 indicates a deprioritization of interventions that were already inadequate to begin with,” he said.

GDP target missed

As far as economic targets are concerned, the Marcos administration still has a far way to go, missing its GDP growth target for the second straight year.  

In 2024, the economy only grew by 5.7%, revised from earlier reported 5.6% growth, below the 6.0% to 7.0% target for the year. 

Growth surpassed the target ceiling in 2022 at 7.6%.  

As of the first quarter of 2025, the country’s GDP grew by 5.4%, faster than the upwardly revised growth rate of 5.3% in the last quarter of 2024.

With missed targets, the Development Budget Coordination Committee has slashed again the growth goals for 2025 to 5.5% to 6.5% range from the previous target of 6.0% to 8.0%.

The economic team cited heightened global uncertainties, such as the unforeseen escalation of tensions in the Middle East and the imposition of US tariffs as considerations for adjusting the growth targets.

Nonetheless, the administration’s aspiration to elevate the Philippines to upper-middle-income country (UMIC) seems to be getting closer, as it missed the minimum for entering the UMIC bracket under the World Bank’s classification by $26.

The country remained a lower-middle-income economy as its GNI per capita in 2024 stood at $4,470, while the required GNI per capita to enter the UMIC roster was at $4,496 to $13,935. — BM/NB, GMA Integrated News

Published Date: July 27, 2025