BACOLOD City – The Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) has increased import clearance fees for high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) to P30 per equivalent bag of sugar to curb the use of the artificial sweeteners.
In early 2017, SRA charged companies that import HFCS 30 per bag but this was lowered a month later to 1.50 per bag, and suspected to partly cause demand for domestic sugar stagnating in the past few years.
SRA administrator Pablo Luis Azcona said the increase of import clearance fees for HFCS was unanimously passed by the Sugar Board last month and formed part of Sugar Order (SO) 4.
The issue of artificial sweeteners was raised by United Federation of Sugar Producers president Manuel Lamata along with other sugar leaders in Luzon and Mindanao to Department of Agriculture (DA) Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel in early August.
“The SRA immediately acted on the concern. Thus, while collection of data on the use of artificial sweeteners is ongoing, we discovered this and decided to immediately raise the SRA fees for HFCS,” Azcona said.
Furthermore, another SO is being drafted based on the August 6 meeting between Laurel and other sugar stakeholders, millers, refiners, farmers, where UNIFED expressed alarm on the entry of “other sugars” or tariff code HS1702.
“This entails requiring importers of items under HS1702 to secure an import clearance from SRA and this has been under board discussion since August,” Azcona said.
He added that it has come to his attention that a similar letter addressed to Laurel was sent by a group called the Sugar Council and National Congress of Unions in the Sugar Industry of the Philippines this week.
“We welcome that more stakeholders are actually concerned about this issue and has decided to support the alarms initially raised by other sugar federations,” he said.
The alleged volume of imports under HS1702 is estimated to be around 200,000 tons, much higher than what some federations say. With this, Azcona said they continue to verify the data as this has been happening as far back as 10 years./PN
