ILIGAN CITY — A local task force has summoned at least two rice traders to appear on Thursday to shed light on allegations that they are hoarding rice supplies.
The Task Force on Rice Hoarding (TFRH) has summoned businessmen Sonia Payan and Johnny Tan, following Wednesday’s raid on their warehouses where local officials discovered sacks of rice that have potentially been smuggled from Malaysia.
The TFRH, composed of officials from the National Food Authority (NFA) and National Bureau of Investigation (NBI), said the raid on the traders’ warehouses in Barangay Palao indicates that rice supplies from Malaysia have been repacked to make them look like they were locally-milled.
“They will repack the rice and pass them off as local varieties, as can be shown by the empty sacks and the sealing machine”discovered at the raided warehouses,” said THRF member Abdul Jamal Dimaporo, chief of the NBI-Iligan District Office.
Worse, Dimaporo said, the owners did not declare the warehouses to the NFA and were found to be operating without a license.
At Payan’s warehouse, the task force found 20,000 bags of rice. Tan’s warehouse, meanwhile, also yielded some 30,000 bags of rice, also suspected to be smuggled from Malaysia.
TFRH members were unable to inspect a third warehouse, owned by Chinese national Yan Jianzh, because the latter was not around.
Dimaporo said some of the warehouse owners denied hoarding rice supplies, noting that they voluntarily allowed the task force to inspect their premises to show they are not hiding anything.
Dimaporo said the rice traders would still be questioned about their storage practices to determine if they comply with NFA regulations against hoarding.
“Upon the instruction of President Rodrigo Duterte to look for the hoarders because of the inflation ng mga prices natin (of our prices), nakita natin itong dalawang bodega (we saw these two warehouses),” Dimaporo said, referring to Payan’s and Tan’s warehouses.
“We talked with the NFA, we joined forces, then checked if they have licenses. What we found out is that they only obtained a license for one warehouse and would not declare the others,” he said in Filipino.
Sambatori Dimaporo, NFA provincial director in Lanao del Norte, said aside from monitoring rice hoarding in the area, the agency is also monitoring rice prices in the market.
“Every week we are going around to monitor NFA-registered rice retailers and distributors, but these warehouses (Tan’s and Payan’s) are not in our list. These have been undeclared,” he said. (Divina Suson/PNA)
