The Sugar Regulatory Administration (SRA) said Wednesday they plan to bring down prices by releasing more imported sugar to the markets.

In a “Laging Handa” briefing, SRA Acting Administrator Pablo Azcona said the farmgate price of sugar has stayed at P60 since February.

“If you look at it, in February the farmgate price of brown sugar lowered to P60. So it stayed at P60 and until now, when we are about to finish harvesting, the price is still at P60,” Azcona said.

But at the retail market, one kilo of sugar is being sold at least at P105 a kilo in supermarket while it is P98, the SRA said in its April 20 report.

“The problem is the spread from the farmgate price to the retail price keeps increasing. So what we are doing to address that is by releasing as much as we can of the imported sugar to the market, hopefully, to lower the retail price because imported sugar is cheaper. It will mix with the local produce which has more stocks. It will surely bring down the prices,” he added.

“The only hurdle for this instance, this is all businessman control so SRA does not have the power to enforce pricing,” he said.

Azcona said 180,000 metric tons of sugar out of the 440,000 MT to be imported have arrived.

Of this number, 116,000 metric tons of sugar have been converted for domestic use and will be released to the markets.

The SRA expects the remaining volume of imported sugar to arrive by August.

“The deadline for all arrivals usually, like in this case, we usually make sure that they arrive before the end of August because September 1 is the start of the harvest season,” Azcona said. Jaspearl Tan/DMS