The Philippines was one of the top producers and exporters of sugar in the world then. It constituted the bulk of our agricultural exports from the 1950s to the 1970s. Sugar was our leading agricultural export product before and after World War 2.
While our policymakers rhetorically insist on the employment of science in deciding what is good for the sector, politics remains the main consideration despite the presence of empirical evidence beyond refute that we are facing a serious supply shortage of sugar as attested by its soaring prices in the market.īut if the existence of a shortage and the volume of supply shortage are still being questioned (due to sustained attack against the Sugar Regulatory Authority's (SRA) report indicating serious sugar shortfall), the best course of action to take is to instruct the National Economic Development Authority, by virtue of being the official government think tank on socioeconomic policy and the repository of official data, to conduct a simple supply and demand analysis of sugar to determine whether there is really a need to import sugar, and if yes, the volume that we should be importing to tame sugar price inflation and lessen the suffering our millions of consumers.īy signing up with an email address, I acknowledge that I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. I am reprinting portions of it and adding some insights as the issue has become a prime example of how policymakers and the policymaking process have prevented the development of our agriculture sector. A LARGE chunk of this column was published around four months ago before the "sugar crisis" we are now experiencing.
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