Philippine Trade and Industry Secretary Gregory L. Domingo ought to be chastised severely for allowing the importation of UNTESTED products into the country.
Domingo must have forgotten the sheer terror that Filipinos underwent when news broke about MELAMINE TAINTED INFANT MILK!
Moreover, this preferential treatment smacks of being HOSTILE to Filipino companies and Filipino products.
While it burdens Filipino companies with stringent and sometimes unnecessary requirements, Domingo opens the gates wide for GIANT MULTINATIONAL FIRMS like UNILEVER to FLOOD THE PHILIPPINE MARKET with POTENTIALLY UNSAFE GOODS THAT HAVE NOT UNDERGONE TESTING.
The Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI), Domingo said the DTI is reviewing procedures by which to improve business environment and one aspect they were looking at to relax product standards requirements.
In the same event, Domingo said that he favors the grant of full government support to selected industries that grow and compete and manage the decline of the uncompetitive to be able to manage effectively the limited government resources.
On the standards issue, Domingo has toyed with the idea of granting provisional release of imported products while undergoing product testing. Imported products are subject to Import Clearance Certificate (ICC). If an item does not pass the required standards, it cannot be issued an ICC and without the ICC mark it cannot be sold in the local market.
Domingo further said they are looking at allowing a “green lane” for products that have shown discipline and for that they could be “exempted from the ICC” requirements. If these imports slide back, they can be brought back to non-green lane.
This has irked the FPI, which has been involved in the crafting of the mandatory standards on some 80 products.
“We worked so hard so that this ICC will undergo very strict printing process because before it was being printed by the importers themselves,” Arranza said.
The ICC is meant to protect the safety of consumers, Arranza said.
“It is quite absurd that the Secretary of Trade, in whose department the BPS (Bureau of Product Standards) is an organic agency, will advocate for quick release and conditional release of the ICC.
He should have studied that a lot of those products that were released on conditional release before were sold even prior to examinations, so the harm has been done already even before the government could even determine if they are substandard items,” Arranza said.
There has been an unabated influx of substandard products ranging from food to construction materials, like ceramic tiles and steel bars.
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