Agri dept approves additional corn imports
Manila Times
THE government has approved the petition for an additional yellow corn import this year owing to supply shortage, Agriculture Assistant Secretary Dennis B. Araullo said Wednesday.
He added that the agency has also granted the industry’s request to combine the two separate tranches of 70,000 metric tons and the new 200,000 metric tons in one tender.
“The only thing we’re studying now is the time of arrival of these imports,” Araullo said in a telephone interview.
The slated arrival of the imported corn is January to early February next year, he said. The National Food Authority, on the other hand, said it will likely reschedule the combine tender in the third week of November.
However, Araullo expressed fear the auction might yet again fail such as “what happened to the 70,000 metric tons that we auctioned last month” when traders called off the proceedings because of the high prices in the international market.
“It might fail again because the price of corn today is still high,” he said.
Eleanor Miranda of the Philippine Association of Feed Millers affirmed Araullo’s projection, saying “we might fail again [because] our monitoring shows the price of corn now is at $310 per metric ton from $305 during our last bidding.”
Miranda added that his group’s feedstock is good only for two months, when “normally, we have stocks good for three months.”
The 70,000 metric tons were originally expected to arrive before the end of December and the 200,000 metric tons by January to February next year.
–Chino S. Leyco
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