Veggie industry faces bleak future
Philippine Daily Inquirer, Oct 03, 2005
Veggie industry faces bleak future
Delmar Cariño, PDI Northern Luzon Bureau
LA TRINIDAD, Benguet — The province’s vegetable industry, like other domestic industries, would face a bleak future under a reduced tariff scheme of international trade in the next few years, a group of business leaders said in a paper.
The group, called Fair Trade Alliance (FTA), recently said in a paper that vegetable farmers stand to lose more in a local market where prices and the law of supply and demand would be dictated by competition from the entry of foreign vegetables.
The FTA’s 119-page paper, the "Nationalist Development Agenda," blamed the country’s trade commitments to the General Agreement on Tariffs Trade (GATT), the World Trade Organization (WTO) and bilateral trade pacts for the problems facing the vegetable industry.
Vegetable industry leaders here recently obtained copies of the paper.
These commitments, the FTA said, had made the country one of the most open economies in Asia today, due largely to the adoption of a tariff liberalization policy that has affected all sectors, including agriculture.
Board Member John Kim said the FTA’s prediction of uncertainty in the vegetable industry is now being confirmed by bilateral trade talks the government had signed or are negotiating with other countries.
Negotiations for tariff reduction for product exchanges with Korea, the United States and Japan are in the drawing board, he said.
An early harvest program (EHP) had been concluded in April between the country and China to facilitate a free trade system that will be in full scale by 2010.
The FTA paper said Cordillera farmers have reacted negatively to the EHP because of fears that the local market would soon be flooded with cheap Chinese vegetables.
A remedy, Kim said, is to ask the country’s Tariff Commission to impose the highest allowable tax on foreign vegetables once importers attempt to bring them into the local market.
He said to justify the imposition of a levy on foreign products, Benguet’s major vegetables must first be included in the commission’s "sensitive track," a list of cash value crops, as a safeguard against the surge of vegetable imports.
In a letter to Commissioner Edgardo Abon of the Tariff Commission, Kim asked that Benguet’s potatoes, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, mushroom, celery, red pepper, green pepper and cabbage be included in the list.
Kim, chair of the provincial board’s committee on agriculture, agreed with the FTA’s observation that the country’s vegetables would fare poorly under a reduced tariff scheme because in other countries, the government subsidizes the vegetable industry.
"There should be no reduction in agricultural tariffs and the foreign counterparts of the 10 Benguet vegetables must be slapped the maximum tariff of 40 percent," he said.
The FTA paper said vegetable farmers from the provinces of Benguet and Mt. Province have been complaining about the influx of imported and smuggled vegetables since 2001.
It said that the country imports 30 kinds of vegetables and the volume of imports had grown since the country became a member of the WTO in 1995.
