Bayan Muna representative Teddy Casiño yesterday called on the Aquino administration to “seriously address the call of local food and meat producers to stop the smuggling of rice and meat products into the country and to stop the preferential treatment to a foreign-owned agribusiness giant that would snuff the life out of Filipino hog and poultry industries.”
“Considering that rice smuggling has exploded under Pres. Aquino’s watch with rice smuggling estimates at over P16.6 billion, it is imperative that the frontline government agencies such as the Bureau of Customs should attend to this. What we see is a pittance of apprehensions of smuggled rice that is hurting our farmers, rice millers and the general public,” Casiño said.
“It is never good for a rice-producing country like ours to be flooded by Vietnamese, Indian, Thai and Chinese rice. In fact, we have yet to see Customs official statistics on the long-standing problem of smuggling of rice, onions, vegetables, pork, chicken, corn and other agri products,” he added.
While the Customs bureau has identified the ports of Cebu and Davao as entry points of shipments of rice that are misdeclared, there have been no major significant seizures outside of the P450 million Indian white rice shipment at the Subic Bay Freeport last year and the 94,000 bags of Vietnam rice confiscated in Legazpi, Albay.
“Government claims that it has drastically reduced the rice importation levels from 2.5 million metric tons in 2010 to 500,000 metric tons in 2012 is negated by rice smuggling that apparently picked up in the same period. It shows that government actions or inactions on smuggling have long been hurting local businesses,” Casiño said.
Casiño also pledged his party’s support to tomorrow’s multisectoral agricultural summit in San Juan City that is calling for the cancellation of the government grant of incentives and tax breaks to Charoen Pokphand Food Corporation, a foreign-owned agribusiness corporation.
“The Makabayan Coalition joins the summit, our colleagues in Congress from the party-lists Abono and AGAP, and the various agriculture industry associations in calling for a stop to the government’s preferential treatment to Thai firm Charoen Pokphand Food Philippines Corp. (CPFPC). The 6-15 year holiday on taxes and import duties granted by the Board of Investments (BoI) at the minimum undermines our national sovereignty and food security,” Casiño said.
