Crop pestilence: Alcala, look what you’ve done

Upon becoming agriculture secretary in June 2010, Proceso Alcala lost no time packing the rank and 56 sub-agencies with his lieutenants. It wasn’t so much to fulfill a mission-vision of food plenty, critics say, than to fortify his political bailiwick, Quezon province. His positioning of trustees supposedly was to amass campaign funds for a congressional rerun. Not unfounded, with the way his wards raided the coffers of the National Food Authority, and sapped the energy from the rest.

Alcala spent his time thinking up newer, stickier ways to suck up to the impressionable President. He so dazzled him to become one of three favorites in the 26-man Cabinet. The President has remarked not a few times about Alcala’s sterling trait of reporting not only problems but also the completed solutions.

It was all a farce. Alcala was not really solving, but creating and worsening troubles. His four years in office has wrought rice shortages and price surges, and pestilence in major exports: coconut, sugarcane, and banana.

Infamous is how Alcala wrecked the planting, supply, and price of the Filipino staple. When the WTO grace period for the NFA monopoly of grains imports ended in 2012, he did not do right to leave it thence to private traders. It would have benefited all. Fifty-percent duties on rice imports — P10 billion a year — will boost agricultural budgets. More money will go into irrigation, seedling research, fertilizer subsidies, and, most vital, support of palay farm-gate rates. Supply will be ample, and retail prices stable. The NFA’s P200-billion debt will stop ballooning.

Alcala did the reverse. He sued for longer WTO deadline, risking punitive price spikes of various agri-imports from antagonized member-states. He then directly imported 705,000 tons. While chattering about self-sufficient rice harvest, he had his NFA point men negotiate with Vietnamese counterparts — through a private Manila broker — what later was exposed as a P3.4-billion overprice. The promised self-sufficiency flopped. How could it not: land planted to rice and farm support never grew, but population did, five-fold, since the country last had adequate rice in 1978? Even then, Alcala underestimated the needed import. Result: retail prices surged; smuggling thrived. Alcala blamed the likes of “cartelist” David Tan, his own NFA’s most favored importer since 2010.

Alcala’s NFA crooks continued the scam in 2014, even diversifying the plundering into cargo handling. Rice continued in short supply, and prices high.

Similar messes in fruit industries are now headlines. As coconut scale insects defoliated nine Batangas towns, Alcala’s personal lawyer, placed to head the Philippine Coconut Authority, did nothing. By 2012 pestilence had spread to neighboring Southern Tagalog provinces: Rizal, Laguna, Cavite, and Alcala’s Quezon, and Basilan in Mindanao. Still no action.

Only this week did the Bureau of Plant Industry admit the scale-insect contagion as well of guava, lanzones, mangosteen, avocado, papaya, breadfruit, and various palm species. The situation is so critical to warrant inter-town transport registration and regulation.

Worse is the infestation of bananas, mangos, and sugarcane. If it spread to Davao, Zambales-Pangasinan, Cebu-Guimaras, and Iloilo-Negros, Philippine crop exports will collapse.

Not only that, Filipinos will go hungry and sick. For bio-security, foreign lands will bar them entry or impose severe quarantine. Joblessness will rise; trade and investments will slump.

When that happens, angry Filipinos will not want Alcala to simply resign. He deserves worse.

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If willing there are ways, if unwilling there are excuses. From news accounts, BIR chief Kim Henares has many alibis to not investigate mounting reports of tobacco tax evasion.

When first informed last year of a cigarette maker’s smuggling of tobacco ingredients, Henares dismissed it as competitors’ sour grapes. Told later that the firm was retailing P1-cigarettes despite the higher new sin taxes that force rivals to sell at P2, she said there’s no law against a company losing money. When her finance secretary-boss ordered an investigation and her counterpart Customs chief padlocked the firm’s bonded warehouse, she rattled off figures. Supposedly the levies on sin products, including alcohol, were exceeding expectations. Collections in the first four months alone hit P23 billion, 5.8 percent above her P21.7-billion target. Taxes from cigarettes reached P11.3 billion, up 14.2 percent from P9.9 billion in the same period last year. Notified nonetheless that UK-based Oxford Economics and US-based International Tax & Investment Center jointly calculate tobacco tax evasion to have reached P15.6 billion, she questioned the commissioner of the study.

Now steps in the main lobbyist for sin taxes, offering to monitor compliance by feuding tobacco firms. The world-renowned Framework Convention for Tobacco Control has a stake to defend. It had fought long and hard in Congress for the higher rate, and so wants it collected right. “Third-party monitoring” is not new: it has been done at the Customs, and is being done in public biddings.

Again Henares nixes the idea, on grounds that the Revenue Code empowers only (corruptible) BIR officers to watch the cigarette makers. Meanwhile, to make up for the P15.6-billion leak from the tobacco tax, she is running after lawyers, doctors, economists, and other professionals, many of whom had supported the higher sin taxes.

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Calling all members of the EKIT (Samahan ng Kabataang Pilipino):

With the theme “Palawakin ang Kapatiran, isulong ang mga adhikain,” the 46th anniversary unfolds on Aug. 30, 2014. National convention and fellowship to be held in Manila, sponsored by UP-Manila resident and alumnis chapters. For details, contact Brods Mike Mabutol, (0908) 8957995, or Carlo Logro (0917) 8363843.

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Catch Sapol radio show, Saturdays, 8-10 a.m., DWIZ (882-AM).

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