Sugar Council supports SRA probe on low sugar prices

The Sugar Council, representing thousands of sugarcane farmers from three planters federations, expressed its full support to the probe announced by the Sugar Regulatory Administration to uncover the reason behind low farmgate prices of sugar.

“We laud SRA for taking this initiative, and we strongly support SRA’s move to investigate why sugar prices have been lower than the P3,000 per 50-kilo bag, which SRA itself had forecasted before the start of the milling season. We look forward to a comprehensive and expeditious probe, and we eagerly await its results,” a press statement from the Sugar Council stated.

Comprising the Sugar Council with their respective presidents are the Confederation of Sugar Producers’ Associations, Inc. (CONFED) – Aurelio Gerardo J. Valderrama, Jr., the National Federation of Sugarcane Planters (NFSP) – Enrique D. Rojas, and the Panay Federation of Sugarcane Farmers (PANAYFED) – Danilo A. Abelita.

When the first two biddings of this milling season yielded prices between P2,500 to P2,750 per bag, SRA Administrator Paul Azcona issued a statement that the sugar regulatory body would investigate what could have caused the price depression.

“Definitely none of the farmers want the low price so we will focus our investigation among the mills, traders and importers to see if there is some abnormality in their dealings but rest assured that we will get to the bottom of this. Someone is definitely making a scenario and we will not take this sitting down,” Azcona said in his statement last September 18.

National media outlets reported earlier that Azcona suspected “irregularities” or “price manipulation” behind the decline of sugar prices, which has not recovered until now. Farmgate sugar prices last week ranged from P2,501 to P2,760 per bag, which are still lower than the P3,000 per bag which sugarcane farmers expect.

Related to this, the farm gate price of P2,760 per 50-kilo bag translates to only P55.20 per kilo in the retail market. But in reality, actual retail price of sugar continues to hover between P80 to P100 per kilo. This leads the Sugar Council to wonder why farmgate price is low. This also proves that sugar farmers are not causing the high retail prices.

To help arrest the drop in farmgate prices, SRA released last October 12 Board Resolution No. 2023-159 dated September 26, 2023 “to hold in abeyance all applications of conversion and maintain the classification of all imported sugar as Reserved”.

“Despite the fact that the average retail price of sugar remains the same, the average farmgate price of raw sugar which hovered between P2,500.00 to P2,750.00 per bag during the first two weeks of CY 2023-2024 continues to go down, to the detriment of sugar farmers, allegedly by reason of oversupply,” the SRA stated among its premises to the resolution.* (PR)