THE garment industry is urging the government to set up a supply chain committee ensuring the procurement of locally made medical-grade personal protective equipment (PPE).
The proposed committee should be led by the Department of Health and Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to work with the local industry in planning and implementing a national PPE sourcing plan, the Confederation of Wearable Exporters of the Philippines (Conwep) and the Coalition of Philippine Manufacturers of PPE (CPMP) said in a joint statement.
“The Committee shall be tasked to draw up the measure of each critical steps, plan the logistics, and set up a cohesive procurement and planning program sourcing medical grade PPE produced locally, and supporting local employment,” Conwep and CPMP said.
This is part of the garment’s call for the government to establish a “comprehensive” stockpiling sourcing program as only few of the locally made PPEs are being purchased by the public sector while foreign supplies flood the domestic market.
The repurposed garment manufacturers, CPMP, participated in the government procurement of PPE through a bidding process around November to December last year.
However, they noted the local capacity was “not maximized” as only 27 percent of the monthly capacity for coveralls and gowns (815,000 units) and 69 percent (41.3 million) of the monthly mask capacity by the CPMP members were used.
These products have been produced and delivered by around January or February this year.
“A comprehensive procurement program which provides a gestational period for local manufacturers to source and stockpile on raw materials, within a calendar year should be in place,” the joint statement reads. “The Government can plan the requirement projections to ably address the bottlenecks in the PPE supply chain management mechanism.”
Repurposed factories
On the onset of pandemic, CPMP repurposed its factories heeding the call of DTI to boost the supply of medical grade PPEs and invested $35 million. This helped in retaining 7,450 jobs to produce minimum of 3 million pieces of gowns/coveralls, 60 million pieces of masks and 10 million units of PPE accessories every month.
CPMP was able to supply an annual capacity of 720 million masks, 36 million units of medical grade coveralls and isolation gowns, and 120 million units of PPE related accessory cover by third quarter of last year.
“The local PPE manufacturers employ an estimated 2,500 to 3,000 workers and could considerably increase once the Government’s national PPE requirements are exclusively sourced from the local medical-grade PPE manufacturers,” Conwep and CPMP said.
Earlier, Trade Secretary Ramon Lopez backed the garment industry’s plea for the government to have a preference over locally produced PPE during procurement.
He expressed the need to have a legislative measure that will prioritize the purchase of “critical products” made locally such as the PPEs.
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