(Eagle News) – The country’s business sector, including bankers and foreign businessmen, has issued a joint statement fully backing the bill seeking to impose tariffs, recognizing it as measure that will liberalize the economy and eventually free consumers from “food supply apprehension,” according to the Department of Finance.
The joint statement was signed by the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP), American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (AmCham), Bankers Association of the Philippines (BAP), Financial Executives Institute of the Philippines (FINEX), Foundation for Economic Freedom (FEF), Judicial Reform Initiative (JRI), Makati Business Club (MBC), Philippine Investment Funds Association (PIFA), and the Semiconductor and Electronic Industries in the Philippines Inc. (SEIPI).
Their joint statement expressed full support for the administration of President Rodrigo Duterte’s ongoing efforts to liberalize the economy, including the passage of the rice tarrification bill.
Finance Assistant Secretary Antonio Joselito Lambino II said these organizations have forwarded a copy of their joint statement expressing their support for the rice tariffication bill to Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III last month.
“We, the undersigned business and professional organizations, hereby strongly support ongoing efforts and measures of the administration to liberalize the economy and thereby unleash its full potential to ensure sustainable, robust and inclusive economic growth, while ensuring better quality of life for our people through affordable food,” the various business groups said in their statement.
They said there was a need to “balance the interest of both producers and consumers.”
The business groups described the rice tarrification bill as a “bill intended to decisively and quickly address the rice supply disruption problem and concomitant high prices experienced last year to the detriment of consumers.”
They said that maintaining a strategic reserve of rice stocks is necessary to guard against supply dislocations that may arise in case of natural calamities, climate change and price disruption in the global rice market.
“Earmarking and judicious utilization of the rice import tariff revenue for these purposes will greatly help attain these objectives,” they said.
The business groups said that upon enactment of the bill, the rice tariffication law will help “harness the financial resources, management expertise, logistics support, and extensive nationwide distribution system of the private sector to ensure food security, particularly of the most important food staple—rice.”
The rice farmers will be protected from unfair competition through the imposition of a 35 percent import tariff on imported rice, noted their joint statement.
“We urge the sustained provision of essential support services and facilities–irrigation, better seedlings, modern growing and efficient harvesting technology, safe agricultural chemicals and post-harvest facilities by the government to further assist the farm sector to be more productive and increase rural income,” the joint statement further said.
