Desperately seeking Christmas gift from BOC
Alyansa Agrikultura, a farmer-fisherfolk coalition of 42 federations and organizations representing all major agricultural sectors, is asking for a Christmas gift from the Bureau of Customs.
It is a demonstration of political will by the new Bureau of Customs (BOC) management, now headed by Commissioner John Sevilla. Two newly appointed BOC Deputy Commissioners will also play key roles. They are Jessie Delloza for Intelligence and Primo Aguas for Management Information Systems and Technology.
All three BOC officials are very well qualified to usher in a new dawn at BOC and three key actions are needed from them.
These needed actions were brought up during the February 10 to 11, 2011 tripartite Agriculture Fisheries 2025 (AF2025) Conference of 200 leaders.
This tripartite gathering formulated an agriculture fisheries vision for 2025 with recommended short and long term programs to achieve this vision.
One imperative was to reduce rampant smuggling. It has been two years and 10 months since then and action is wanting.
Will we wait for Christmas 2014 before we see any BOC movement in this area?
The three key actions that can demonstrate the BOC’s political will were also identified as the top three BOC anti-smuggling moves during the Dec. 10 meeting of the National Competitiveness Council (NCC) Committee on Anti-smuggling and Import-Export Documentation. This committee is composed of officials from the Departments of Finance, Agriculture, Trade and Industry, Justice, and representatives from the private sector.
The first of these key actions is BOC’s automatic transmittal of the Inward Foreign Manifest (IFM) to the DA and DTI. The IFM contains the list of imported products, the ship these will arrive in, and the date of the shipment. The BOC gets this list one to two days before actual arrival. If DA and DTI also have this list, they can stop the entry of the products without import permits and other technically smuggled items.
In 2005, the IFM was made available to DA and DTI. It was a significant factor in reducing smuggling then. But ever since the BOC withheld this information, smuggling has significantly increased.
The second action is for BOC to provide information to DA and DTI on the amount of goods entering into, as well as exiting from, customs bonded warehouses (CBWs). CBWs are an acknowledged major source of smuggling. The difference between these two amounts is the potential smuggling leakage. This is because these imported goods are meant exclusively for processing for outward exports. All amounts leaked into the domestic market do not pay the required tariffs and value-added taxes.
The third action is for the BOC to allow private sector membership in ICARE, which is the BOC’s unit that accredits legitimate importers. Claro Arriola cites the case of 50 small accredited importers sharing the same office address but importing huge volumes. He argues that with ICARE private sector participation, the list of accredited importers will be cleaned up and potential smugglers delisted.
Aside from these three actions, the Alyansa is asking that BOC stop its prejudice against agriculture, probably because small farmers and fisherfolk do not have the same resources as industry.
For example, in the BOC’s Valuation and Classification Review Committee, DTI is represented while DA is not. BOC gives the Import Entry Declaration to DTI, but not to DA. In the current administration, BOC stopped its accreditation of farmer and fisherfolk leaders, but continued this with industry representatives.
Janet Napoles is accused of depriving our people of P10 billion in 10 years. In his last Sona, President Noynoy Aquino said that smuggling results in a P200 million loss in just one year. This is 200 times worse than the Napoles scandal.
Furthermore, the UN Trade Statistics show that for the top 25 countries which account for 86-91 percent of our imports, BOC has increased its underreporting (most of which is smuggling) from 8 percent percent ($45.5 million) in 2004 to 30 percent ($78.5 million) in 2011. This trend was reversed only in 2005, when BOC made its information database transparent.
When this transparency was lifted, smuggling increased every year.
It has been two years and 10 months since the Alyansa asked for the restoration of this transparency. It is hoped that the new BOC management exercise its political will in this area in time for Christmas. This way, the increasingly frustrated and severely harmed smuggling victims will not have to wait for Christmas 2014.
(The author is chair of Agriwatch, former Secretary for Presidential Flagship Programs and Projects, and former Undersecretary for Agriculture, Trade and Industry. For inquiries and suggestions, e-mail [email protected] or telefax (02) 8522112).
