Local pork traders seek TRO vs EO 5
DAGUPAN CITY—A group of hog raisers is seeking a temporary restraining order from the Supreme Court against the Department of Agriculture to stop it from enforcing Executive Order No. 5, which prohibits dealers from selling meat if the products are eight hours old after the animal is slaughtered.
Rosendo So, Abono party-list chair and director of the Swine Development Council, said the Samahang Walang Iwanan Cooperative of Umingan town has drawn up a petition that seeks to freeze the directive, which, it noted, would only benefit meat importers and smugglers.
“We were surprised by the issuance of the executive order which is antilocal farmers and [which] favors the farmers of other countries. [The directive] did not consider the practices of slaughterhouse in the Philippines. The government should protect the local industry,” So told a news briefing.
He said no consultation was made before the issuance of EO 5 in January.
He said the National Meat Inspection Service (NMIS) should instead improve the system of slaughtering animals before tightening controls on the handling of meat.
Regulation
“For instance, in Villasis town, animals are usually slaughtered from 11 p.m. to midnight. Does this mean that the meat could no longer be sold after 8 a.m. and will be confiscated?” he said.
Citing NMIS records, So said there are only 200 slaughterhouses in the country.
He said the government’s attention should be focused on regulating frozen meat products sourced from other countries.
“Since [some meat products sold in the country are] smuggled, we do not know how long the meat have been kept before they were brought to the Philippines,” he said.
He said some areas in the United States allow pigs slaughtered before winter to be frozen and stored for months. “Now we don’t know if the meats that were not sold for 90 days are the ones sold in the Philippines,” he said.
He said frozen meat products are not handled well in wet markets, particularly in facilities that have no freezers. He said defrosted and unsold meat are again put on display the following day.
“We asked the vendors and those who deliver the meat where they source their product, and they won’t tell us, which most probably means that these were smuggled,” he said. Yolanda Sotelo, Inquirer Northern Luzon
