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BACOLOD CITY: Comebacking senatorial candidate Loren
Legarda of the Genuine Opposition on Tuesday appealed for stronger
government efforts to modernize the local sugar industry, warning
that stiff competition from foreign sugar growers with more modern
technology is threatening its survival.
Legarda also underscored the need
for the government to stop the smuggling of sugar, reexamine its
tariff structure to give more protection to local producers and
provide more credit and technical support to millers and planters,
especially the small sugar-cane farmers.
She stressed that the government
needs to be more assertive in enabling the sugar industry to take
advantage of the growing demand for ethanol as an alternative source
of energy.
“More than 600,000 sugar-cane
farmers and sugar-mill workers depend on the industry for their
livelihood,” Leragda said, in a series of campaign sorties in
the municipalities and barangays of Negros Occidental.
“We cannot just abandon them to
the mercies of a volatile market where tens of thousands of sugar
players in other countries with more modern equipment and higher
technology are competing for the sale of their products,” Legarda
said.
She recalled that in the
mid-1980s when the price of sugar in the world market fell
drastically and more than 80 percent of the population of Negros
Occidental and sugar-producing provinces plunged into poverty. “We
cannot allow this to happen again,” she said.
Legarda said that while the local
sugar industry is perceived to be recovering because of higher sugar
prices in the world market, the Philippine sugar industry is still
vulnerable because of its backward technology and outdated sugar
mills. “We must modernize our sugar production and processes,”
she continued.
She cited as unfortunate that
while the governments of sugar-producing countries reduced their
tariffs on the product by only 10 percent to 14 percent, the
Philippines reduced the tariff to 50 percent, which placed the sugar
industry at a big disadvantage in the home market.
“Our government bureaucrats
should be more caring for our local sugar producers, as well as all
other industries in our agricultural sector, instead of favoring
foreign producers in an irrational spree of unbridled
globalization,” Legarda said.
--Francis Earl A. Cueto
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