BACOLOD City – The government’s plan to liberalize sugar importation in the country is “alarming,” according to some local stakeholders.
Wennie Sancho of the Save the Sugar Industry Movement said the proposed measure will have an “adverse economic impact” on sugar workers and their families.
Sancho, also the labor representative to the Regional Tripartite Wages and Productivity Board in Western Visayas, said the sugar industry particularly in Negros Occidental “will die” should the plan pushes through.
Budget secretary Benjamin Diokno last Wednesday said deregulating the sugar import policy will help curb the rising prices of basic goods, in line with President Rodrigo Duterte’s Administrative Order No. 13.
The order was issued in September 2018, when the national inflation rate hit a nine-year high of 6.7 percent.
Manuel Lamata, president of the United Sugar Producers Federation of the Philippines, said his group along with other sugar federations will send a letter to the Office of the President to oppose the plan.
The current import policy gives the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) authority to assign “volume allocations” to local traders’ and farmers’ groups.
If this is relaxed, more sugar imports will enter the country, resulting in the drop of domestic sugar price, SRA Board members Roland Beltran (millers’ representative) and Dino Yulo (planters’ representative) earlier said in a joint statement.
According to the SRA officials, the price of domestic sugar has already gone down – from P1,693 per bag in September 2018 to P1,575 per bag as of Jan. 6, 2019.
“That’s a 6.96-percent drop in roughly three months,” they added.
Sugar only becomes expensive when they are sold in retail outlets, Beltran and Yulo stressed.
“The prevailing price of refined sugar at the retail level is P50 per kilo,” they said.
Some outlets, according to them, sell sugar between P60 and P64 per kilogram.
“Focus and investigation should be on retail outlets that have kept their prices high when farm-gate prices have gone down already,” the SRA officials said./PN
