FORMER Interior secretary and senatorial candidate Rafael Alunan said on Wednesday, January 23, that the government should explain their plans to deregulate sugar imports to address high price of sugar in the country.
“The government has to explain why. It's so unfair for the industry,” Alunan pointed out in a press conference on Wednesday.
“First of all, we should ask the government to explain why they are thinking this way and we should press them for their measures and their plans to help the farmers become competitive,” Alunan said.
“What is important is to determine what the local demand is and to see the gap between supply and demand. As we know, the supply of sugar is dwindling because of the conversion of sugar land to non-agriculture purposes like subdivisions, mixed-use,” he said.
He added that “we also lack agricultural workers right now. So productivity is going down and we are going to face a crisis in a very short while if we don't mechanize.”
When supply shrinks, the price will go up and when prices go up the consumers are mostly affected so the government is thinking of reducing the price otherwise it becomes inflationary, he said.
“So one of the avenues or remedies would be importation. Importation must be balanced with efforts to maximize production,” Alunan pointed out.
He added that farmer beneficiaries until now are not taught on how to be productive and how to run a business and because of that, they already have their lands leased or sold. They remain poor when instead income wise, they should be better.
“They don't have access to funding so the government should provide them access to funds, technology, and irrigation for better production and mechanization because it's very expensive to mechanize.
“It's so easy to say let's import but if the government failed to do its job to raise productivity and give farmers a chance to be competitive to make a profit, it's so unfair because definitely, importation will hurt the industry and the workers. While I keep an open mind and understand the need for government to bring down the prices and to provide more supply to the consumers, the other side of it is what they are doing to improve productivity to make sure and help the farmers operate their farms profitably which is the other part of the equation. If there is better productivity, the pressure to import may go down,” said Alunan, who hails from Negros Occidental.
He added that while the government has its responsibility towards the Filipino consumers, they also have the obligation to help the farmers on productivity and competitiveness to lessen the pressure to import. (TDE)