Smear campaign?

Sadly, it’s a “damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t” situation for our agriculture officials.

Militant farmers’ groups are hitting the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the National Food Authority (NFA) for importing enough rice to beef up domestic inventories. What they can’t accept is the fact that attaining self-sufficiency cannot be done overnight (the DA has already put in place a productivity program design to make the country rice self-sufficient by 2013), not to mention problems like climate change, shrinking farmlands and population explosion.

If these groups really want production to increase, then why castigate the DA for frontloading farm-friendly infrastructure projects such as those on irrigation maintenance that are meant precisely to boost production and spell self-sufficiency for the country in five years’ time.

Take the case of the so-called P1.4-billion “bidding scandal” at the National Irrigation Administration (NIA), involving the acquisition of hydraulic excavators and other equipment intended to repair irrigation and drainage canals — and thus dramatically increase the total area of palay lands that can be irrigated or serviced with irrigation water. 

But the project has not been awarded. So where’s the scandal? Administrator Carlos Salazar and other NIA officials can only shake their heads in disbelief. NIA’s bids and awards committee (BAC) has not even completed the evaluation stage of the procurement process for the equipment.

Seven companies submitted letters of intent to the NIA in response to the agency’s bid invitation last December. These were Maxima Machineries, Civic Merchandising, Transport Equipment Corp. (TEC), Wilan Merchandising Phils., Transtar Corp., International Heavy Equipment Corp. (IHEC), and TKC Heavy Industries Corp.

Wilan and Transtar backed out from the bidding while TKC did not submit either a bid or a letter of withdrawal. Civic and TEC were found to have complied with the eligibility requirements for the bidding.

However, Maxima and IHEC, were found to be ineligible for the bidding because of their failure to submit the necessary requirements such as their registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Maxima submitted an expired business permit. IHEC, on the other hand, gave an expired tax clearance.

In denying the appeals by Maxima and IHEC, the BAC reiterated that the absence of their respective SEC Registration Certificates and their failure to submit valid requirements, such as business permits and tax clearances, were considered a failure under the IRR of this law. 

As required under the law, the BAC returned the bids of Maxima and IHEC unopened. But instead of filing a protest within the seven-day period provided under the law, Maxima took a different route by filing a case against NIA, its BAC, TEC and Civic before the Quezon City Regional Trial Court.

As for Maxima’s claim that the BAC imposed stringent rules on the bidders, particularly in requiring them to have at least 25 years of experience as dealer of heavy equipment, it should be noted the amount involved in the bid is no paltry sum. So why take this agency to task for simply making sure that the winning bidder is chosen from among A-1 companies that have an extensive and credible record in this line of business?

NIA obviously wants to get the taxpayers’ money’s worth by making sure that it is awarding the bid to a reliable and efficient company capable of providing after-sales service to the agency. So why are critics raising a howl against NIA for adhering to stringent rules to ensure that the project can be awarded only to a competent company with a fairly good track record?

As pointed out by Salazar, the equipment that NIA is procuring covers long-term purchases, so it would be more prudent to deal with local distributors that have been in the business for a fairly long time. Equipment like hydraulic excavators have 25 to 30 year life spans, so NIA wants to make sure it gets a company that would still be around after 25 years to repair or maintain them.

NIA apparently does not want a repeat of its unfortunate experience of procuring dump trucks from Romania in 1979 and another set of the same equipment from China in 1985, which eventually turned out to be lemons — and a costly drain on scarce taxpayers’ money.

As for the claim that another firm — Monark Corp. —was barred from taking part in the bidding, a check with NIA would have shown that this company did not submit any letter or request for reconsideration expressing its intent to participate. So why take NIA to task again when it was this company’s decision not to take part anymore in this bidding by not filing a request for reconsideration?

There is also an insinuation of overpricing, but this has no leg to stand on because the cost estimates submitted by the qualified bidders were actually found to be below the Approved Budget for the Contract (ABC) set by NIA while that of the disqualified bidder was not.

So, how could Maxima, the disqualified party claim that it could offer bid prices 20 percent lower than that offered by the qualified ones, which are TEC and Civic?

What saddens NIA executives is that, with the bidding process now on hold as a result of the legal action taken by one of the disqualified bidders, the agency’s irrigation projects are similarly on hold, hence putting in some jeopardy the government’s food security and sufficiency programs for 2009.

Critics have been finding fault in the government’s policy of importing rice to keep the supply and prices of the food staple stable, but when the government is doing something to attain self-sufficiency, they shoot down projects that will help us reach this goal.

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