DTI gives flour millers ultimatum

The Department of Trade and Industry is giving flour millers until next week to submit data on how they have arrived at their current prices, as they keep their prices on the same levels even as the costs of inputs and other expenses have already gone down.

Trade Undersecretary Zenaida Maglaya said the DTI had been waiting since last week for the millers’ submissions, but these never came. The deadline for submission lapsed last Saturday.

“If they’re not hiding anything, then they should submit what we’ve been asking them to submit. If they still don’t submit by next week, we’ll have to issue another show-cause order,” she told reporters on the sidelines of the Franchise Asia 2011 International Conference on Thursday.

Maglaya said the DTI had asked the millers to make individual submissions, instead of the usual practice of submitting data as an industry, via the Philippine Association of Flour Millers (Pafmil).

So far, only one flour manufacturer—San Miguel Mills Inc.—has complied with the DTI’s request for submission. The company, however, merely submitted its latest ex-mill price and did not detail how it was able to come up with its per-bag price.

According to the DTI’s monitoring, a 25-kilogram bag of flour sells for between P880 and P920 for wholesale orders.

Victorio Mario Dimagiba, director of the DTI’s Bureau of Trade Regulation and Consumer Protection, said flour prices should go down soon, as world wheat prices had already registered a significant decline over the past few months.

As of August, Dimagiba said the price of wheat in the world market averaged $400 per metric ton (MT), lower than the $520 per MT in June.

Lower wheat prices could only be reflected in local flour prices after two to three months, as it took that long for orders from abroad to get to the Philippines and for imported wheat to be milled into flour.