A Scourge

 

The smuggling of rice has been continuing in the last two years, a senator told DZMM’s early morning radio show Tuesday, citing international data on rice exports to the Philippines and actual taxes paid for them.  In the lawmaker’s reckoning, about 650,000 metric tons of the country’s rice imports each year were smuggled, a problem which she said the Bureau of Customs and the National Food Authority (NFA) can easily solve if they really wanted to.

The solution, according to the solon, is to stop issuing rice importation permits to the private sector, and for government itself to import rice to cover the 5 percent or so of the Philippines’ annual rice requirement which local farmers cannot supply. Under the scheme, only the NFA would import rice and any other shipment of rice coming in would naturally be smuggled and can be automatically seized by the Bureau of Customs (BOC).

Actually, John Sevilla already expressed support for this set up of government-to-government rice importation, said the lawmaker, but  then Sevilla got axed as Customs chief before it could be implemented. Your guess is as good as ours as to why Sevilla got the boot.

Smuggled rice does not only translate to lost revenues for government. It is also used by unscrupulous traders acting as middlemen in the rice trading sector to lower the price of the rice they purchase from local farmers, sometimes at farm-gate prices that are even below cost of production.

The moment government itself starts importing rice to cover our deficit,  the middlemen who have been enriching themselves at the expense of our poor farmers would no longer have imported rice as a leverage to depress farm-gate prices of local rice.

This scheme could hit two birds with one stone by plugging a revenue leak for government and in paying our farmers a fair price for their produce. There’s a perfect balance somewhere there – of farmers earning enough to get out of their hand-to-mouth existence and our consumers having access to quality affordable rice. –end-

Image by North Watch