Bill defines smuggling as economic sabotage

DAGUPAN CITY—The partylist group Abono has filed a bill to fight the smuggling of agricultural products, making the illegal activity a form of economic sabotage.

Rosendo So, Abono chair, said House Bill No. 4767, known as the “Direct and Technical Smuggling as Economic Sabotage Act of 2014,” would help local producers and manufacturers compete and eliminate unfair competition.

“Imagine the taxes lost because of smuggling and its impact on local farmers who cannot compete with the low prices of smuggled goods,” said So, who is also president of Samahang Industriya ng Agrikultura.

So, citing information gathered by Abono, said a total of P65-billion worth of agricultural products like rice, pork and poultry, were smuggled into the country in 2012 and 2013.

“Considering the far-reaching effect of smuggling on the Philippine economy and on Filipinos regardless of their socio-economic status, smuggling should be considered a form of economic sabotage,” Abono Representatives Francisco Emmanuel Ortega and Conrado Estrella III said in the bill’s explanatory note.

They said local producers and manufacturers were “unjustly exposed to unfair competition, which eventually leads to their closure and the loss of millions of jobs for Filipinos.”

“Smuggling likewise exposes the public to substandard and noxious products,” they said.

Under HB 4767, people caught engaging in smuggling and technical smuggling of goods worth a minimum of P1 million would be penalized by a fine equal to twice the fair market value of the smuggled articles; a fine equal to the aggregate amount of the taxes, duties and other charges avoided; imprisonment of a minimum of eight years and a day up to life imprisonment; and confiscation of the smuggled articles.

HB 4767 defines direct or outright smuggling as an “act of importing or bringing into or assisting in importing or bringing into the Philippines, any article, good or product without the corresponding documents, permits or licenses when these are required by existing laws, order, rules and regulations purchase or sale or in any manner facilitating the transportation, concealment, or sale of such article, after importation, knowing the same to have been imported contrary to law.”

Technical smuggling, it said, refers to the act of importing or bringing into the Philippines, any product “through fraudulent, falsified or erroneous declarations for the purpose of, or which results into, evasion of payment of applicable duties and taxes and/or evasion of the rules and regulations of the Bureau of Customs.”

In January, Sen. JV  Ejercito filed Senate Bill No. 2082, “An Act Declaring Rice Smuggling as Act of Economic Sabotage.”

In November 2013, the Senate committee on agriculture and food headed by Sen. Cynthia  Villar invited the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture (Searca) to a hearing that presented a study on the smuggling of agricultural products in the country from 1986 to 2009. Villar asked Searca to come up with a study until 2012.

In 2012 alone, Searca showed, the value of technical smuggling of selected agricultural products such as rice, refined sugar, beef, onion, pork, chicken, ginger and carrots reached P26.5 billion. Yolanda Sotelo, Inquirer Northern Luzon