Monday, March 03, 2008 Amante: Turning Japanese By Isolde D. Amante
CORRUPTION charges have cast an unflattering light on official development assistance (ODA), but these programs remain vital for small and medium enterprises (SME) that want to capture foreign markets.
Two studies point out SME exporters in the Philippines need ODA grants to improve quality control and food testing, among others, and to plug gaps in credit so they can sell more to Japanese buyers.
What hobbles Filipino exporters? Tight credit facilities, high packaging and shipping costs, and the lack of government support to set up food testing centers appear in a list presented by Dr. Rosalina Palanca Tan of the Ateneo de Manila University.
She surveyed Japanese exporters as part of a project commissioned by the Philippine Institute for Development Studies and the Philippine Exporters Confederation to explore the effects of the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA).
“We compete with Ecuador and Taiwan to supply bananas to Japan, with Mexico for mangoes and with Hawaii for papayas,” Tan told participants of a JPEPA forum last week at the University of San Carlos. “We also compete with China to supply Japan with vegetables and processed food, and with Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam for fresh, processed or canned seafood.”
Exporters need to take advantage of a shift in Japanese consumers’ preferences from expensive US or European brands to cheaper but high-quality products from Asia, she added. Among the items Filipino exporters can sell Japanese buyers more of are fermented beverages, children’s toys, animal feeds, sugar, fish fillets, apparel and motor vehicle bodies.
ODA programs—although dragged into controversy recently by allegations of corruption in the national broadband deal with China’s ZTE Corp.—can focus on helping SMEs improve their efficiency or make up for the lack of credit, Tan said.
One way to make the JPEPA more favorable to Filipino exporters, she added, is to compel Japan to develop “import promotion programs” and conduct more “buying missions” for Philippine products. Japan can also accredit more private testing centers in the Philippines, particularly for food products.
In separate study, Amelia Bello of the University of the Philippines Los Baños raised the need for technical assistance so that agricultural products can hurdle Japan’s strict safety and phyto-sanitary standards. Assistance can also explore the use of Japanese seeds “to eliminate the risk of taste failure,” she added.
The JPEPA will compel Japan to remove immediately the tariffs on shrimps, prawns, asparagus, dried bananas, mangoes and copra, among others. Tariffs will be gradually eliminated from fresh yellow-fin tuna, prepared or preserved tuna, fresh bananas, dried pineapples, and fruits containing added sugar.
Japan buys 23 percent of the Philippines’ agricultural exports and is the second largest market, after the United States. Between 1991 and 2001, however, agriculture’s share in total exports from the Philippines has dropped from 35 percent to single-digit levels, Bello said.
Although it’s the top supplier of tropical fresh fruits, the Philippines appears only 16th in the list of top food sources for Japan. The JPEPA, which advocates say will ease Filipino producers’ access into Japanese markets, awaits ratification by the Philippine Senate.
(isolde.amante@gmail.com or http://peryodistang-pinay.blogspot.com)
