Sugar producers appeal to SRA to reconsider sugar importation

Producers based in Negros Occidental, the country’s top sugar-producing province, have asked the Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) to reconsider its order allowing the importation of 200,000 metric tons amid the ongoing milling season.

The United Sugar Producers Federation (UNIFED) and Asociacion de Agricultores de La Carlota y Pontevedra Inc. (AALCPI) on Wednesday issued separate statements opposing the move provided in the agency’s Sugar Order No. 3 supposedly aimed to stabilize the rising cost of sugar and expected low productivity in sugar-producing areas affected by Typhoon Odette.

“SRA Administrator Hermenegildo Serafica issued an order without proper consultation with industry stakeholders. We were never informed and yet he knows we are the biggest group in so far as membership is concerned, and mostly of small sugar farmers,” AALCPI president Roberto Cuenca said in a statement.

Comprised of more than 10,000 members, AALCPI is the largest sugar bloc in Negros Island.

Cuenca claimed the importation order at the peak of the milling season is “ill-timed” and will have “a disastrous effect on the sugar industry, particularly among the small sugar producers.”

“He (Serafica) also knows we are in the midst of milling season and any importation order now will have a ripple effect,” he said, adding that if their appeal will not be heeded, the AALCPI will not hesitate to join protest moves with other sugar federations.

Cuenca dismissed SRA’s stance on the need to import sugar now to ensure a balance between supply and demand and stabilizing prices, saying SRA has not even addressed their concern on the high cost of farm inputs since last year.

For the AALCPI, the volume of importation is “too big and definitely, should not have been granted at this time” thus, the “SRA should reconsider the time and volume of importing sugar”.

“We were informed that most producers SRA consulted agreed to an importation order, but in tranches of 50,000 metric tons and implemented by the closing of the milling season,” Cuenca said.

Meanwhile, the UNIFED, the biggest sugar producers federation with more than 30,000 member-planters nationwide, also questioned the SRA’s current importation move.

“This is appalling that the very agency that is supposed to protect us seems determined to kill the industry,” UNIFED president Manuel Lamata said.

Lamata said they have not also been consulted and while they knew some planters’ groups agreed to the importation program, they thought the SRA and the Department of Agriculture (DA) will also “give in exchange, fertilizers subsidies at the very least.”

It is “very frustrating for SRA to make this import order a priority when it has not even addressed our request to urge the DA and the Department of Trade and Industry to put a cap on fertilizers’ cost since last year,” he added.

Former SRA board member Emilio Bernardino Yulo, a Negrense, described the issuance of Sugar Order No. 3 as “very ill-timed.”

“We are still in a midst of a crisis. Our sugar planters in southern Negros are still trying to recover from the effects of ‘Odette’, and here is another crisis that will hit us. We hope that SRA will reconsider and amend the order,” Yulo said.* (Nanette Guadalquiver)