Blend limits eyed on pre-mixed goods

BACOLOD CITY , Philippines  — Sugar Regulatory Administrator Gina Martin Bautista said she will issue a Sugar Order in the next few weeks to define the allowable sugar blend in the premix sugar products that enter the market.

This was in response to the complaints of sugar planters alleging that its entry could be blamed for the slow sugar trading through the past weeks.

Bautista, in a press conference at the SRA Office in Bacolod the other day, said her order will state that once a premix sugar product is found to have sugar blend of more than the allowable 65 percent, it will have to be placed on tariff.

She also assured the planters that the SRA already has devised a more stringent way of inspecting premix sugar products that would determine the amount of sugar that is being blended in the premix commodities.

Premixes are food preparations that contain sugar with added flavoring and or coloring. These are allowed to enter either at reduced or zero tariff, unlike imported sugar that is subject to a 38 percent tariff.

The Confederation of Sugar Producers (CONFED), the largest group of sugar planters in the country, cited the entry of large volume of premix sugar as the biggest reason for the slowdown of sugar trading in the past four to five weeks.

CONFED Negros Panay chairman Raymond Montinola said the slowdown of trading caused the decline in the price of sugar this month from P2,400 per lkg to P2,200 per lkg.

Montinola, who met with Martin for a dialog Wednesday, said his group suggested solutions on how to arrest the problem on premix sugar. One of these is for the SRA to set an allowable percentage of sugar blend in premix products and, if it exceeds the allowable blend, it should be taxed.

"There is an accepted concept by the World Customs Organization that any sweetened substance containing more than 65 percent sugar is 'sugar,' and should be imposed with tariff under Chapter 17 of the Asean Harmonized Tariff Nomenclature book," Montinola said.

"The certain premix that came in contained 99.9 percent sugar, it's plain and simple sugar. The last figure we saw as the surge or the increase is 25,000 metric tons. Essentially that's bringing in more imported sugar into the country," he said.

The CONFED recommendation was for Bautista to issue her Order categorizing as sugar those premix commodities containing more than 65 percent sugar blend and thus must be taxed, and categorizing as refined sugar those 99.9 percent polarized and be taxed accordingly.

The SRA was also requested to monitor and regulate the entry of premix commodities, to lessen the surge of premix sugar so that industrial users will buy sugar from CONFED, Montinola said.