NFA fiasco emboldened rice smugglers, cartel

NFA fiasco emboldened rice smugglers and cartel

Newly surfaced trader Davidson T. Bangayan is the same wanted Goliath rice smuggler David B. Tan. So said Justice Sec. Leila de Lima after the alleged P6-billion Customs briber visited her office Tuesday. Yet her NBI had not held fugitive Bangayan for questioning, but let him leave for a publicity roadshow. What gives?

In an ensuing TV interview Bangayan suspiciously was evasive. He disowned any link to grains imports. Yet his lawyer strived to justify a recently confiscated rice shipment by a company in whose records Bangayan’s name does not even appear. Again, what gives?

Amid the muddle, talk swirled in the NBI and Customs that Bangayan’s implication is diversionary. Supposedly a rice cartel is setting him up for the kill, in prelude to expanding regional turf from Southern Tagalog-Bicol to Central Luzon-Cagayan. The plot thickens.

Where is the National Food Authority (NFA) in all this? Food security, the agency’s duty, allows no room for smuggler or cartel. But its fudging of figures and policies, in collusion with the Dept. of Agriculture (DA), has emboldened the criminals. The NFA failed to boost farm-gate prices for planters, and slash retail rates for consumers. Buffer stocking should have balanced the seesaw, but its mind was elsewhere. In 2013’s midyear harvest it bought farmers’ palay at a measly P11-P12 a kilo, as its subsidized rice soared P8 to P28 a kilo, rising further since to P33.

NFA fiasco emboldened rice smugglers and cartel

The DA-NFA had everyone fooled. Even President Noynoy Aquino misreported in his State of the Nation last July the government’s import of only 187,000 tons in rice buffer stock. Unstated were 18,700 tons more to arrive. The 205,700-ton total was almost double the previous year’s import of 120,000 tons. And yet, Agriculture Sec. Proceso Alcala, also NFA chairman, had been forecasting since 2010 rice self-sufficiency from 2013 onwards. It just doesn’t compute.

To recall, Alcala and NFA administrator Orlan Calayan last July had blamed the retail price surge on the usual rice cartel. They have not exposed or prosecuted anyone to date. The duo also branded all private rice imports as smuggled. Only the NFA supposedly was authorized to buy abroad. This was despite the expiration since June 2012 of the World Trade Organization’s second extension for the Philippine government to monopolize grains trading. The NFA thereafter announced to import 300,000 to 500,000 tons more as buffer. Never mind that the government would collect 50-percent duties by letting private importers do it.

It turned out from a consequent lawsuit that the NFA had bought the 205,700 tons from Vietnam in April 2013 at an overprice. Lawyer Argee Guevara decried the contract price of $459.75 a ton, when the going rate then was $360-365. The difference, he said, was P2,150 per ton, for a total killing of P457 million.

The NFA claimed no hanky-panky in the government-to-government transaction. Plus, there supposedly were freight and handling fees. Yet Guevara still saw, after deducting such added costs, an overprice of P300 million. Needless to say, facilitator had handled the G2G, as they always did during the hated Arroyo regime.

If only the rice smugglers, cartelists, and DA-NFA officials can be shipped to Davao City. There the mayor, among thousands of others, is the only one itching to use his “executive ability” to exterminate rice manipulators.

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NFA fiasco emboldened rice smugglers and cartel