The Federation of Free Farmers (FFF) said it is planning to file a case against the Tariff Commission (TC) for its alleged failure to comply with the rice trade liberalization law (RTL).
FFF National Manager Raul Q. Montemayor told the BusinessMirror that his group is now talking with lawyers on how to proceed with filing a case against the TC. Montemayor added that their initial plan is to file a case before the Ombudsman.
“We are thinking of filing a case against them for dereliction of duty for not complying with RTL [rice trade liberalization law] in setting the bound rate at 180 percent or more and usurpation of power [for adopting the 50-percent bound rate without any authority from the president or Congress],” Montemayor said.
Montemayor disclosed that his group wrote to TC last April 27 to air their concerns about the rice tariff rates but there was no response from the agency.
“We are just questioning the process by which they arrived at a 50-percent applied bound rate,” he said.
Montemayor said the Philippines does not need to wait for the approval of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to implement the bound rate for rice imports since domestic law “prevails.”
“That’s what Korea did. Since the RTL [law] set the bound rate at 180 percent or higher, there should have been a process followed to reduce the bound rate to 50 percent,” he said.
“They cannot say it is 50 percent just because it was the bound rate before the RTL law, the RTL law already changed the rates. It is a legal matter and we are thinking of forcing them to explain by filing a case, because they are ignoring our queries.”
The country’s rice imports remain unbound to date since the notified bound rates by the Philippines are not yet approved by the WTO. The bound rate is the ceiling or the maximum tariff rate that a country can apply.
Prior to the RTL law, the country’s rice imports had been under a quantitative restriction regime and had an applied tariff rate of 40 percent for in-quota imports and 50 percent for out-quota imports.
During the TC hearings in February, Tariff Commissioner Ernesto L. Albano said the 180-percent tariff rate or higher, as prescribed by the RTL law, is the bound rate and not the applied rate.
Albano said that there has been no petition to change the applied rate which was why the 50-percent out-quota rate was retained “for many years.”
In fact, Albano disclosed that the bound rate notified by the Philippines to the WTO, as computed by the TC, is 198 percent.
The move of FFF comes after various industry groups have expressed opposition to the Executive’s decision to reduce the tariffs on rice imports to 35 percent, both for in-quota and out-quota imports.
Industry groups like FFF and the Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura have sought lawmakers’ intervention to void President Duterte’s Executive Order 135 reducing the tariffs on rice imports to 35 percent. They said the measure was “baseless and detrimental to farmers.”
In its letter to lawmakers, FFF said the reduction of rice tariffs is “totally unjustified” and the reasons cited by the Office of the President about the measure are “baseless.”
FFF said the country’s rice market is already “wide open” for imports from any country following the enactment of the RTL, which deregulated the industry.
“There is no need to reduce tariffs nor is there any assurance that imports from non-Asean countries will increase simply because of a lowering of tariffs on their rice exports,” it said.
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