Corruption hurting $1-B banana exports – Piñol

The Department of Agriculture (DA) will push for policy amendments and the development of a research center in the banana industry after finding out that the country's banana exports worth $1 billion have been susceptible to corruption and diseases in the past administrations.

Agriculture Secretary Emmanuel Piñol said he will intensify government efforts to avoid further economic losses due to a decline in the banana sector.

This was after the Agriculture Chief found out that the country's banana exports, which are mostly coming from Mindanao, have been susceptible to corruption.

Members of Mindanao Banana Federation of Exporters Association (MBFEA) are particularly complaining for not getting any receipt from Bureau of Plant Industry for some fees amounting to R56 million annually.

Piñol suspects that BPI officials took those fees as "overtime incentives."

"What I'm questioning is the propriety of a government employee's acceptance of incentives from the people they are supposed to regulate. How could you be objective in your evaluation of the quarantine standards of the products being exported if you are accepting money from the company you are supposed to supervise?" the Secretary said.

"The government should really pay for the overtime services of its employees but I won't tolerate such practice because it compromises independence," he added.

Piñol said this could result to a decline in export because we could be sending bananas of lesser quality due to biased regulatory inspection.

To avoid this, DA Legal Consultant Israelito Torreon said the government must amend a particular DA administrative order during the term of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001.

"Apparently, the legal basis [of overtime incentives] is DA administrative order number 1 series of 2001. If you will read this, this allows employees to charge overtime fees of R50 per hour, R75 per hour for meal expenses, R12 per hour for transportation expenses. But what's happening is that the actual collection could reach as high as R750 to R2,500 per month and these are not receipted," Torreon said.

"There may be need to amend DA-AO number 1 but subject to approval because this is really open for corruption," he added.

According to him, there are 85,000 hectares of banana plantations in Mindanao, 42,000 of which belong to the group of big companies, while 43,000 are under small growers. There are also 19,000 hectares with unclear status.

Aside from this amendment, the industry would also need to create a National Research Council for Banana to avoid diseases.

"Our bananas are afflicted with Panama disease and until now we don’t have any cure for this because nobody is actually looking at this problem," Torreon said.

Piñol was also amenable to the development of a database collecting all information concerning the sources of bananas.

"This is very important because in exporting bananas, you need to determine the sources because if these reached China and are affected with bug problems, at least you have data where the bananas were sourced from and you can pinpoint the problem," he said.

The ultimate goal is for the country to seek other export markets for banana and other products such as Russia.

"During the meeting, I told the small banana exporters that DA will take the lead role in opening up new markets for them. We will help them. In fact, the first marketing blitz will be in Vladivostok, Russia," Piñol said.

"There's no target yet but we will bring banana exporters to them, not only bananas but also pineapples. The Vladivostok fair will be on September 2 to 3. MBFEA is willing to join. That is my commitment to them," he added.

Aside from bananas, DA will also promote other agricultural products of the Philippines with export potentials.

"Abaca, for example, we will really support the abaca industry and other products like coco water, which I think will find a good market in Europe," he further said.

Regarding shipping issues, such as long travel period resulting to rotten commodities, Piñol only said "we will always find a way."

BREXIT need not lead to the complete disintegration of the European Union (EU). One can be certain, though, that there will be a significant slowdown of growth in most of the member nations of the EU, including Germany. The incipient recovery in some of the countries of the EU will be further delayed. The great economic powers of the twentieth century, sometimes referred to as the American Century, can no longer be expected to be engines of growth of the global economy. The United States, Japan and the EU will have to take a back seat to the three economic powers that will propel the Asian Century, i.e. China, India, and the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) which can continue to grow at annual average rates of 5 to 6 percent as the advanced countries of the West (cum Japan) will languish at less than 2 percent per year.

Both China and India have very large populations and can increasingly depend on domestic consumption for their economic growth. At least two countries in the AEC, Indonesia and the Philippines, are also achieving aboveaverage rates of GDP growth because of their large domestic markets which are increasingly peopled by middle class families. These two emerging markets in the ASEAN are the least dependent on exports to grow their GDP. Vietnam, the only other ASEAN country included in the list of the Next Eleven among the emerging markets (the first four used to be the BRIC countries), is still highly export dependent but can also, like China, stimulate more its domestic consumption for attaining high growth. The seven other countries in the ASEAN Economic Community (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos) can shift more and more of their trade with their fellow ASEAN economies and with China and India (without decoupling with the rest of the world) in order to lessen the impact of the slowdown in the EU, the US, and Japan as a result of BREXIT and the ensuing crisis in the EU.

Sometime in 2012, the late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew, already foresaw BREXIT when he said in an interview that he expected the EU to face serious problems of disunity because EU was growing too fast and was in too much of a hurry to attain, not only economic integration but also socio-political unity. The way I would interpret the words of Lee Kuan Yew is that because of sharing a common