Ahead of Customs clearance
MANILA, Philippines -The country’s imported food products must now be inspected first before being assessed by the Bureau of Customs (BoC) to ensure food safety and avert increasing cases of smuggling, the Department of Agriculture (DA) said.
Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol is urging Customs to implement a section of the Food Safety Act, which requires all food imports to be cleared first before assessment by the BoC.
“We will invoke this provision of the law where we should be the first to process any shipment. The DA will determine first whether shipments have complied with sanitary regulations,” Piñol told reporters in a chance interview.
“We are doing this because as practiced now, our inspection activity happens after Customs’ process. That’s why there are a lot of smuggling cases,” he said.
In line with this, Piñol is set to issue a department order that would create an Agricultural and Fisheries Trade Facilitation Unit to be stationed in the country’s different ports of entry to ensure that imports are examined first by DA personnel before the BOC.
The group will be composed of members from DA-attached agencies Bureau of Animal Industry, National Meat Inspection Service, Bureau of Plant Industry and Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources, a lawyer and a police officer to be assigned as the team leader.
“The BoC shall provide documents such as the inward foreign manifests of arriving vessels to enable us to identify shipments requiring food safety inspections. Shipments not complying with national regulations shall be disposed according to policies established by the DA and DOH (Department of Health),” Piñol said.
While importers would be the ones directly affected, Piñol said that if they are legitimate, they should not worry and instead be glad because the DA is cleansing the ranks of fictitious importers.
The DA’s move comes days after it issued an order canceling all import permits of all agricultural products, particularly meat, to curb smuggling.
Piñol has recalled and cancelled all permits following the rampant smuggling of agricultural products.
The DA has so far validated 1,700 permits out of the over 3,000 issued permits.
Piñol also slammed the indirect statement of industry group Samahang Industriya sa Agrikultura (Sinag) that the re-issuance of new import permits might become a new source of corruption for some people.
“We have no ulterior motive and we are just implementing the law and promoting transparency to all,” he said.