By Modesto P. Sao-noy
Manipulation of facts for financial gain is usually a method used by the corrupt. It is intended to hide the facts and thus waylay the unperceptive, people who usually put their trust in those who are in authority. But sadly for the trusting, they are betrayed. This appears to be a case with SRA’s methodology in the face of continuing decline in production, increasing smuggling and rising shift to alternative sweeteners.
One thing I noticed in the data presented by SRA is the absence of the now popular use of muscovado sugar as a healthy sweetener. This is probably because this kind of sugar, produced by backyard mills and in small quantities, has not been included in the reckoning of our sugar production and consumption since the Sugar Quota Administration created during the Commonwealth period. SQA was concerned only with centrifugal and refined sugar.
Relegated into the background the healthy sweeteners remained unaccounted for in our consumption but they do take away tons of sugarcane from the mainstream and not recorded as production or consumption.
In the proper order of things, the SRA is mandated to protect the financial interests of the producers, the consumers and even that of the government from the money it collects from the industry. The SRA charter is clear and precise, the membership of the governing board is balanced to ensure that all interests are protected.
But this is not so. The history of the SRA and even its predecessors – the Sugar Quota Administration and the Philippine Sugar Commission – have plenty of dirt hidden and glaring, but the producers had been mainly silent thus allowing the power holders to run roughshod over the producers and the consumers. As the song of Simon and Garfunkel “Sound of Silence” intones, “silence, like a cancer, grows.” The silence of the producers has been exploited to mean consent.
My long years of study of the industry show that this monstrosity of manipulating data developed because the producers and the consumers have failed to exercise their right to demand compliance of the law and had allowed the shenanigans to flourish.
Steven Chan has somehow opened a Pandora’s Box in his presentations of SRA’s statistical data for the last five years. For some years he had been placing advertisements on what he perceived as sickness in the SRA, but the majority of the leaders of the industry find it convenient to go with the tide, except during the last ten years of Philsucom from 1976 to 1986 when the boiling point was reached that the men and women of the industry, not their top leaders, joined forces to topple the martial law regime that perpetrated the illness of the industry.
In 1986, the SRA was created with the hopes of the producers that things would be better – their interest as that of the nation be protected and enhanced. Their hopes were fulfilled but as the producers relaxed their vigilance and the lands were parcelled off into small plots, the situation opened the gates for exploitation due to the lack of watchfulness and pervasive complacency. There were times they murmur their travails but that was it, the discontent feeding itself.
In his April 7 advertisement, Steven Chan was frank: the culprit behind all this has always been the export-import business of the Sugar Alliance. Bloomberg describes the Sugar Alliance of the Philippines as “an organization that operates as a professional association. The Association works to promote better relations between sugar planters and millers, addressing industry problems, and other issues concerning the sugar industry.”
This description is way off because the Alliance is not a professional group but of people of common economic interests, in this case, of sugar.
The Alliance looks like SRA of the private sector with laudable objectives nobody can quarrel with. But Steven Chan has a point in blaming the Alliance for the situation on the industry due to its “export-import business”. He did not specify in his advertisement but the fact that he said the Alliance is in “export-import business” is clear enough of what it is doing.
To put a brake on the operation of those with business relations with the SRA, like the SAP, Steven Chan called for transparency.
We’ll continue tomorrow.
