Albee sugar
mission to Thailand

Rep. Alfredo “Albee” Benitez (Neg. Occ., 3RD District) will spearhead on Sept. 21 to 24 a group of legislators from the House of Representatives who will study Thailand’s sugarcane and sugar policies to come up with concrete proposals for the Philippines.

This is the exact opposite of what we used to see. Thais used to gravitate to the Philippines, especially UP Los Baños, to study sugarcane cultivation and sugar technology.

But over the several decades, the Thais have crafted a robust sugarcane industry while the Philippines remained in the tight grip of what is the perennial problem between excess production and pricing as well as the high production cost.

Now, it’s the other way around. We are studying what Thailand has adopted in terms of sugarcane manufacture and sugar policies if the industry will have to overcome the complex problems that will haunt the industry by 2015.

We hope that Albee will be able to discover what went wrong with our local sugar industry and how we could overcome some of the problems that have marred our efforts to attain our leading position as one of the world’s biggest producers of sugar.

For one, it may be a good idea for Albee to determine how the Thai government has nursed their sugar industry throughout the years to be able to boost it as one of the country’s major producers of export products.

In a way, another major difference is the social amelioration program of the Philippine sugar industry which boosted the production cost in return for a more humanitarian embrace of sugar workers.

But there is also the need to address the problem of ethanol and its past promise as the alternative for sugar production. While we were way ahead of Brazil in the past when President Marcos first introduced the alcohol-gasoline mix for car fuel, this was subsequently eliminated because of birth pangs.

And revived only recently. But the rosy promises of ethanol sundered soon with the potential investors holding on to an empty bag of government promises and to prospects of incentives that would enable them to recoup their investment in ethanol.

The final gasp of the infant industry was the executive order by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo which granted a zero percent tariff on the importation of bioethanol by oil firms.

That was done under the pretext that local ethanol manufacturers were not producing enough of the additive to fulfill the five percent blend for vehicle fuel and the BioEnergy Act.

That is something which until now President Benigno Aquino III has yet to abolish. And the result was that San Carlos Bioenergy, Inc. had to shift back to sugar production because it was not earning enough from ethanol production.

But La Carlota is already gearing to produce an additional 30-million liters to add to the 40-M of San Carlos.

Overlooked in the process is the ethanol plant being completed in Isabela in Northern Luzon. So with the Leyte ethanol plant.

If anything else, just the abrogation of the Arroyo EO plus the implementation agreement to oil firms will not be allowed to buy bioethanol from abroad without first buying locally-produced ethanol might be able to revise interest in bioethanol and provide relief for the sugar industry.

Anyway, I hope that Albee and his colleagues will be able to craft a policy that will enable the sugar industry to survive beyond 2015 despite the misgivings about that catastrophic zero tariff on imported sugar.

* * *

So, the discovery of the body of ex-convict Joy Voluntate in Kabankalan City last Monday wrote finis to the bloody career of the gunman who had earlier killed Police Officer 2 Rafael Gemoto, 45.

But what caught my attention was the fact that Voluntate was tied up to a total of four killings in the city, and not just two as earlier claimed by the Supt. Calixto Mabugat, the new Kabankalan police chief.

It turned out that Voluntate had also caused the death of four persons, including Gemoto, which earned him the tag of public enemy number one of Kabankalan City.

The question – how could Voluntate have continued to roam around the city with the deaths of four (or three) hanging over his head? Why was he not disarmed by the police prior to his shooting down of Gemoto?

Just asking questions, Sir.

* * *

Now, the issue of the pace of government spending having slowed down so much that no projects will be implemented is coming to the surface.

This time the question comes from the Makati Business Club Ramon del Rosario Jr. In short, as I had earlier commented, the government needs to accelerate spending at a time of crisis. Apparently, the fear of corruption has so paralyzed the bureaucracy so much that virtually spending has come to stand still. The problem the present situation demands that government releases the flow of money to prop up the job market and to pump more money into the hands of the population that could support the business sectors.

Now, it’s the other way round in the case of the alleged stalling of the building of hydro-electric power plants in Negros Occidental because of contract signed by the Department of Energy in 2009 to several first.

Jose Ma. Valencia, chief of staff of Governor Alfredo Marañon Jr. complained these DOE service contracts had closed all rivers of the province form being exploited by firms which are ready to do their work on them.

These contracts, entered into by DOE, Secretary Rena Almenadras reported were awarded to firms that have not sent their representatives to the province even if only to conduct feasibility studies.

Valencia is correct. It seems that these firms are only interested in holding on to their contracts to preclude other interested parties from conducting the necessary studies that would enable them to undertake the development of hydro-electric plants that could service the power needs of the province.

Time for Almenadras to cancel these service contracts and award them to other firms that are waiting for a chance to do their thing.*

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