The Philippines is joining another free trade pact. Like before, farmers, fishers, poultry and hog raisers foresee fearsome floods of cheap imports. Government is again promising to help them cope.
But won’t history just repeat itself? Will officials plunder billions anew in the name of agricultural competitiveness?
Watch this Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. President Duterte signed RCEP in September 2021. Senators are to ratify it this month. It supposedly will boost commerce among the ten ASEAN states and neighbors China, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand. More than a hundred groups have expressed misgivings. Food growers are unprepared to contend with fully mechanized, high-tech foreign rivals.
“But when will they ever be ready,” RCEP proponents will insist to win in the end.
That already happened 28 years ago. Manila in 1995 became one of the World Trade Organization’s 128 founders. Countries forcibly lowered import tariffs. Mostly industrialized countries benefitted. Philippine copra, sugar, salt, rice and abaca, among other industries, plunged.
Only after five years did government react. Debates ensued on how to prop up domestic food producers. A plan was devised to support with remnant import duties the many sectors crippled by free trade. Namely, onion, garlic, ginger, vegetables, fruits, corn, mills, fertilizers, pesticides, poultry, piggery, cattle, fishing and aquaculture.
An Agricultural Competitiveness Enhancement Fund was put up in 2000. Duties from food imports starting 1990 were plunked into it. ACEF accumulated P10.73 billion by 2010.
The fun began in 2004. ACEF was assigned to a Department of Agriculture undersecretary. His task: lend the money to agribusinesses and farm cooperatives.
Another usec pulled off a P728-million fertilizer fund scam. Malacañang doled cash to a hundred or so friendly congressmen, including in cities, purportedly to buy inexistent liquid fertilizer. Its exposure overshadowed the bigger ACEF plunder – hitting P8.85 billion.
Details were laid bare in 2012. ACEF’s usec had lent out P5.82 billion to 299 borrowers. All gave 10- to 30-percent kickbacks. None repaid the loans.
Grants of P2.57 billion were given to the usec and DA regional directors’ friends. Among the grantees was Quedancor, a 60-percent government rural livelihood firm capitalized at P2 billion. It frittered away its P1-billion grant. Another P372.78 million went to scholarships.
The usec used his loot in 2010 to win a congressional seat, from which he pocketed pork barrel funds.
Today, agriculture sorely lacks cold storages, transport and machineries. That’s because the crooks in 2004-2010 stole what should have financed the construction of ice plants-cum-refrigerated warehouses, fertilizer and pesticide making, trainings, high-speed drier-mills and tiller-thresher-harvester combines.
Senators need to review ACEF along with RCEP. For Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri, RCEP is a done deal: “I’m here to listen to the pros and cons, but in the end we must look at the overall picture of how it will help our country to grow into tiger status.”
Among RCEP’s opposers are Federation of Free Farmers chairman Leonardo Montemayor and United Broiler Raisers Association president Elias Jose Inciong. Like WTO, the new pact will crush domestic producers under the weight of import dependence.
They know whereof they speak. As agriculture secretary in 2001-2002, Montemayor witnessed WTO’s ill effects and the makings of the ACEF scam. Inciong and fellow poultrymen had applied for ACEF loans in 2008, but backed out when asked for 30-percent kickback.
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