• GILBERT P. BAYORAN
A labor group has warned of social unrest, joblessness, economic dislocation and eventual collapse of the sugar industry, if sugar prices continue to plummet.
“The time that we dreaded most has come,” said Wennie Sancho, secretary general of General Alliance of Workers Associations and convenor of Save the Sugar Industry Movement.
Sugar farmers have blamed the sugar importation for the low trading prices of sugar, with the prevailing prices reported only between P2,300 and P2,500 per 50- kilo bag, below the expected price level of P3,200, and below the comfortable profit margin for sugar producers and small farmers.
Sancho said there are more supply, but the demand remains the same as he blamed the oversupply to the import liberalization scheme of the government.
Describing it as alarming, he said the sugar import liberalization will have an adverse effect to agrarian reform beneficiaries, small farmers, industrial and mill workers who are dependent on the sugar industry.
Conservative estimate shows there are around 300,000 sugar workers in Negros Island alone and about 500,000 nationwide as well as about 65,000 sugar farmers in the country.
“If the downward trend in the prices of sugar shall continue, it would be devastating for the labor sector,” Sancho said.
He added that the penchant of the government to implement sugar import liberalization without doing an assessment on the state of readiness of the sugar industry is a fatal mistake.
“It will be a blue Christmas for the workers in the sugar industry, if there is no intervention from the government to address this crucial problem, especially that the millgate price of sugar is at P50 per kilo, while the retail price continue to remain at P80 at the expense of the consumers,” he added.
Sancho said they are joining the call for government intervention and proposes a dialogue with the planters’ groups for a united front to address the issue and save the workers from economic catastrophe.
“A unified action is necessary to avert the impending disaster,” he added. | GB
