SRA should be investigated

By Modesto P. Sa-onoy

In several articles I wrote about the manipulation of facts by the Sugar Regulatory Administration and I believe that a congressional investigation is in order to give the SRA the opportunity to defend itself in a proper forum. The data released by Steven Chan to the press since the start of this month that I already commented on, provide interesting information that so far the SRA has not refuted. Does SRA’s silence means that SRA accept the data as accurate and cannot explain their negative implications? If SRA remains adamant in refusing to dispute them we take them as credible.

Of course interpretation is different from the facts. Thus a refutation is needed but it can also be waived lest more unsavory data are exposed.

Chan came out again with a new advertisement. This time he issued “An Appeal to the Public”. This means us, the consumers who in the long line of business transactions carry the burden of paying for the corruption or negligence along the way of goods from the producers to the market.

Sugar is a basic commodity. People can forgo other products but sugar in its basic state is a necessity in the household, from the first coffee sip in the morning to the dessert that concludes a meal. Consider a life without sugar!

However, despite this fundamental need, most people are unaware of the road that the sweet cane, the caña dulce, takes from the farm to the plate or glass. It is this complacency of just leaving things with the authorities that consumers pay for that negligence of the needed awareness of how sugar prices are manipulated.

Steven Chan’s series of advertisements is a call to awareness, the last a proposal for an investigation of SRA because he believes, as we do, that the consumers are being “milked” by the manipulators. I have written about the system for too long, I guess that oftentimes I think producers and consumers don’t give a hoot about how they are skinned by the SRA regulators.

The call of Steven Chan for investigation of the SRA is triggered by the move in the Senate to probe the “alleged activities of a syndicate within the Department of Agriculture which stands to make possibly Billions from the recommendation to reduce tariff rates and increase the minimum access volume on pork imports.” It said that “the Philippine Anti-Corruption Commission also announced a parallel investigation on the alleged corruption in pork importation.”

In the discussion on the manipulation of sugar data, I mentioned that this operation goes against national interest, the producers, consumers and the government as it unduly benefits the manipulators financially. It is, I believe corruption that has gone on for so long dating back decades. It was temporarily stopped by the People Power revolution in 1986 but hot money is easy when people are not vigilant.

Indeed the sugar consumers and even most of the producers are not vigilant although they would express now and then their protest. But it ended nowhere. Sure there were investigations by Congress but the fact that the operations remain speaks for the failure of the government and the producers to pursue the issue to clean up the mess.

So once more, a call to investigate SRA. Will the representatives of the people in the Senate and the House respond positively or will the powers behind this operation prevail?

Chan rightly claims that the same corruption as in pork imports exist in the sugar industry and he called for the anomalous practices in involving SRA and the Department of Agriculture to which SRA belongs. The Secretary of DA is the chairman of SRA, thus he is the top man to be accountable.

Steven Chan charged that the DA and SRA crafted “regulations that do not consider public interest and welfare but the interest of favored traders.”

To support his charge he “urged media to consider the uncontroverted facts and to do more to counter-checking the data and be more discerning in reporting future SRA stories.” He presented statistics of the Philippine sugar situation from Crop Year 2015-2016 to CY 2019-2020 to prove his charge.

Let us discuss tomorrow the implications of these statistics.