Almost every day we hear or read in the news that the Department of Agriculture (DA) or the Bureau of Customs has seized smuggled products amounting to millions, even billions of pesos. This is part of two government agencies’ effort to protect our farmers from the influx of agricultural and fishery products smuggled into our country from the neighboring Asian countries.
Aside from the smuggled ones, the importation of rice and other agricultural produce has placed our farmers at the losing end. If my memory serves me right, every past occupant in Malacañang had allowed the importation of rice from Thailand or Vietnam even when our rice production could sustain the supply in our local markets. Worse, it’s the illegal importation or smuggling of rice that practically flooded the markets at very low prices.
The unrestrained importation of rice whose price is even lower than that of our local rice could have compelled some rice farmers to sell their farms to real estate developers who converted huge farm lands to housing subdivisions, thus reducing our capability now to produce more grains and other agricultural products. The reason could also be due to the tempting high valuation of lands now.
What’s even harder to believe is that the National Food Authority’s buying price of grains is so low that some farmers opted to sell theirs to middlemen, hence the price of locally produced rice is more expensive than the imported or smuggled rice.
Our legislators should have passed laws that will protect our farmers’ products from the imported or smuggled agricultural products. If the price of all imported agricultural products is much higher than the locally produced ones, then patronage of local consumers of our own produce would simply follow. Protection for our locally produced farm products over the imported is what our farmers need.
It’s sad to know that farmers in Luzon have to dump their tomatoes and other farm produce because there are no takers since the prices of the imported agricultural products are much lower than the farmgate prices of our farmers. Developed countries have laws that protect their farm produce or local products by imposing high prices on imported goods through their tariff barriers, which are “the tax or duty imposed on the goods which are traded to/from abroad. Tariffs are paid by domestic consumers and not the exporting country, but they have the effect of raising the relative prices of imported products. Other trade barriers include quotas, licenses and standardization, all seeking to make foreign goods more expensive or available in a limited supply (Investopedia).”
But with the huge influence of the big businesses or importers on our legislators, I doubt if our Congress would ever pass laws that would in a way protect our own farm produce or products from the imported goods and encourage us Filipinos to patronize our own produce. As Investopedia puts it, economists favor the free trade policies in a global market since they’re ideal and tariffs only benefit the few domestic sectors, meaning the farmers.
As an example, in Australia, which I can talk about with my experience having lived there for some time, the prices of imported cigarettes are so sky high that even my Filipino friends who love to smoke American brand cigarettes have no choice but to buy the Australian brand cigarettes because their prices are more affordable than those imported.
Would President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., as the secretary of the DA, ask the congressmen allied with him to pass a law or laws that would protect the interests of our farmers? Calls from the President’s allies and his sister, Sen. Imee Marcos, for him to appoint a permanent DA secretary, seemingly fell on deaf ears.