June 21, 2019
Madelaine B. Miraflor (Manila Bulletin) | https://bit.ly/2Fu38zX
Sugar Industry Development Act (SIDA) is supposed to be one of the best crafted laws in the Philippines since it covers beyond a sector’s value chain — scholarship, fund for research and development (R&D), loan assistance, and budget for infrastructure. It’s too bad a massive budget cut awaits the law’s implementation for this year.
An official from Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) said SIDA may only have a budget of P65 million for this year. That’s a huge cut from the P2 billion that is supposed to be spent to implement the law every year, and way lower than the P500 million budget earlier proposed for this year.
“SRA has a fault too,” the official said. “But there are also other problems”.
Under SIDA law, not a big chunk of fund directly goes to SRA. Its socialized credit program is distributed through Land Bank of the Philippines (LandBank) and for the infrastructure projects such as farm-to-market roads (FMRs), the funds are being downloaded directly to the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH).
The official claims that LandBank thinks too much of itself as a banker and is too strict in releasing loans to poor sugar workers and as for DPWH, it just takes a while to get a project approved and for the funding to arrive.
“We can’t feel the backbone,” Confederation of Sugar Producers Associations, Inc. (CONFED) Spokesperson Raymond Montinola said, referring to the law’s implementation.
Even if the budget for SIDA is largely reduced, it wouldn’t make any difference for the sugar stakeholders since they barely felt the law’s impact since its enactment in 2015, he added.
Because of this, Montila said “it’s prudent enough” to say that in order to streamline the processes in SIDA, the Congress should step up and review the law.
SRA Board Member Roland Beltran, for his part, said he has already called for an agency-wide strategic planning to talk about SIDA alone.
SIDA was supposed to receive a combined amount of P8 billion in the last four years or P2 billion every year since its passage, but Beltran said only “more or less” P3 billion was actually made available to bankroll the law’s goals.
“There’s really a need to review the law,” Beltran said.
Last year, Senator Cynthia Villar complained about the government’s under-utilization of SIDA’s fund, saying that SRA “has no capacity” to spend the funds allotted for the program.
For a small agency, SRA officials knew they would encounter some “birth pains” in implementing the law, but almost five years since the law was passed, they know they are facing a bigger problem that can only be addressed by amending some SIDA provisions.
Right now, the country’s local sugar farming and mill operations are said to generate P90 billion annually from the sale of raw sugar, refined sugar, molasses and ethanol.
The industry also provides employment to 700,000 sugar workers across more than 20 sugar producing provinces in the country.
A sugar producer said that the industry has been pretty much self-sustaining over the years, barely receiving support from the government.
SIDA was enacted for the purpose of increasing the country’s production of sugar as well as increase the income of sugar workers and planters.
In contrast, the output of the industry has been on a downtrend at least in the last three years and the sugar workers feel that the government already abandoned them, especially with their pronouncement regarding liberalization or allowing more imported sugar to enter the country.
For this sugar crop year, which started in September last year and will end in August, SRA pegged its final production target at 2.07 million metric tons (MT). As of May, production already hit 2.06 million MT.
The sector’s output for this year is going to be lower than what was produced in the previous years. During the last crop year, the country produced about 2.1 million MT of sugar, which is lower than the output target of 2.27 million MT and the 2.5 million MT recorded in the previous crop year.
Montinola said the two-year downtrend in the sugar production was a result of climate change and the overall decline in the sector’s manpower.