SEN. Joseph Victor Ejercito yesterday slammed the Department of Agriculture, the Sugar Regulatory Administration, and the Bureau of Customs (BOC) for allegedly being remiss in their duty to stop the smuggling of agricultural products.
He said negligent officials of these three agencies, specifically from the BOC, should be held liable for apparently turning a blind eye to agricultural smuggling.
To stop agricultural smuggling, he said he will urge his colleagues in the Senate to strengthen their oversight functions.
Ejercito said six years since the passage of the Anti-Agricultural Smuggling Act, which he principally authored, agricultural smuggling has even worsened.
“It’s their responsibility to really stop smuggling and protect our farmers and the industry itself. So, on that alone, they are remiss in their duties. Probably, we can already study the filing of charges against these officials who remain remiss in their duties. They did nothing in the past six years,” Ejercito said in mixed Filipino and English.
Ejercito made the statement amid the series of raids conducted by BOC and SRA teams on warehouses suspected to be keeping smuggled or hoarded sugar.
He said Customs could have conducted the raids, which the Marcos government calls “visitorial inspections,” even before the law was passed. Had the BOC been more active in detecting and apprehending agricultural smugglers, the country’s current problems with its sugar supply would have been avoided, he also said.
The agency’s recent raids on warehouses containing hoarded sugar prove that the alleged sugar shortage in the country was engineered by agricultural hoarders, he said.
“It was said there was shortage of sugar. But it seems it was just an artificial shortage, because we can see that there are sugar stocks in warehouses raided by the Customs.
They were suddenly awakened to see that there are lots of supply… Probably they are hoarding. The traders are hoarding these products intentionally so that prices will jack up),” he said.
