• GILBERT P. BAYORAN
The Sugar Council, which is composed of three planters’ federations, has expressed its full support to the move of the Sugar Regulatory Administration to investigate the reason behind on low farmgate prices of sugar.
In a statement, the Sugar Council said they are looking forward to a comprehensive and expeditious probe.
When the first two biddings of the current milling season yielded prices between P2,500 and P2,750 per 50-kilo bag, SRA Administrator Paul Azcona issued a statement that they would investigate what could have caused the price depression.
“Definitely, none of the farmers want the low price so we will focus our investigation among the mills, traders and importers to see if there is some abnormality in their dealings but rest assured, we will get to the bottom of this. Someone is definitely making a scenario and we will not take this sitting down,” Azcona said in his statement issued last month.
Azcona has aired suspicions of “irregularities” or “price manipulation” behind the decline of sugar prices, which has not recovered until now. Farmgate sugar prices last week ranged from P2,501 to P2,760 per 50-kilo bag, which are still lower than the P3,000 per bag expected by sugarcane farmers.
The Sugar Council said the farm gate price of P2,760 translates to only P55.20 per kilo in the retail market, but in reality, actual retail price of sugar continues to hover between P80 and P100 per kilo.
This also proves that sugar farmers are not causing the high retail prices, it further said.
To help arrest the drop in farmgate prices, SRA released last Oct. 12 Board Resolution No. 2023-159 dated September 26, 2023 “to hold in abeyance all applications of conversion and maintain the classification of all imported sugar as Reserved”.
“Despite the fact that the average retail price of sugar remains the same, the average farmgate price of raw sugar, which hovered between P2,500 and P2,750 per bag during the first two weeks of crop year 2023-2024, continues to go down to the detriment of sugar farmers, allegedly by reason of oversupply,” the SRA stated among its premises to the resolution.
The Sugar Council is composed of the Confederation of Sugar Producers’ Associations Inc. (Confed), National Federation of Sugarcane Planters (NFSP) and the Panay Federation of Sugarcane Farmers (Panayfed). | GB
