The Bureau of Customs (BOC) announced that it has partnered with the Philippine Chamber of Agriculture and Food, Inc. (PCAFI) as a means to address the issue with agriculture smuggling in the Philippines.

Atty. Vincent Philip Maronilla, a spokesperson for the BOC, explained that the partnership was brought about by the department’s inability to formulate strategies that could effectively counteract the existence of illegal trade.

“For years, we’ve tried different programs in the Bureau of Customs, a lot of anti-agricultural smuggling measures, but nothing much really happens, I guess because one thing that we all look back into what the problem really is, the thing is we are not really experts on these issues,” he said in vernacular.

Maronilla said that the collaboration would work through the means of establishing Agriculture Technical Experts (ATEs) from PCAFI that would be assigned to different agricultural subsectors and will be tasked to inspect shipments that are suspected to be smuggled.

The lawyer noted that the ATEs would be provided with documents that are not considered confidential under their guidelines to serve as reference for their monitoring.

“We don’t feel any need to hide anything from them because we do have a very strict policy in anti-agricultural smuggling, and any and all help coming from the private sector is very much welcome,” he explained.

Maronilla underscored that the joint inspections would mainly focus on sectors wherein tariff lines are high risk due to the existence of product smuggling, effectively distorting local revenues and decreasing prices of domestic goods.

The agricultural group’s President Danilo Fausto highlighted the importance of the development given that he said that they had little to no access to information from the BOC regarding shipments in the past.

“This is a game-changing move. We commend and appreciate Customs Commissioner Ariel Nepomuceno for this and other swift action he is taking to support the agriculture sector,” Fausto said in a statement.

Last 27 March, the customs agency reported the seizure of P47.43 million worth of products from the Port of Subic, noting that the agency was still actively fighting against the existence of underlying networks which allow for the illegal exchange to proceed.

Nepomuceno noted that the BOC was in the process of strengthening its approach through intelligence-driven enforcement measures.