FLOOD OF IMPORTS: You must have noticed that cheap imported products have been flooding the market. While consumers haunted by falling real incomes may welcome the availability of cheaper substitutes, affected local producers are terrified of the prospects of going out of business.

There are many reasons for the deluge of cheap imports. The cost of producing them is usually low to begin with. Also, selected producers abroad are sometimes granted subsidy or tax incentives by their governments. And when their goods are landed here, our reduced tariff rates make sure they eventually carry lower and competitive prices.

But the spirit of affected industries and their workers was buoyed recently when President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo ordered a review of the country’s unilateral tariff reduction program. Her move was supposed to be a reaction to their complaint that our accelerated tariff reduction has been hurting them.

The government is set to reduce to 0-5 percent the prevailing 15 percent tariff for products coming from our Asean neighbors starting January next year. This is a program the country has committed to the Asean Free Trade Area (AFTA) under the Common Effective Preferential Tariff (CEPT).

Ailing and infant industries, as well as inefficient ones, have expressed hope that the review ordered by the President would result in a postponement or a favorable revision of the programmed tariff reduction.

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BETTER TO IMPORT?: Agricultural products such as vegetables are one of the hardest hit, losing out to cheap imports. Vegetable producers in Baguio, Tagaytay and similar green areas have complained about imports from Australia and parts of the US.

Among the cheaper imported (sometimes smuggled) products that have been displacing local goods are rice, sugar, fruit, canned goods (e.g. tuna), dairy products such as cheese and fresh milk, olive oil, peanut oil (canola), steaks, frozen meats, garment, kitchen ware, household furnishing, petrochemical products, construction materials including cement and electrical products.

While other countries, especially those with more robust economies, want us to open our market in the guise of free trade, they take extraordinary steps to protect their own. And our government agrees to this arrangement that has been strangling ailing and infant industries.

Are we headed for that point where it would be better to import than to manufacture or to engage in agriculture? Would it be more practical to just shut down factories, lay-off workers and import rather than to expand business and hire more Filipino workers? Are our labor costs, which are high compared to those of some of our neighbors, pricing our goods out of the market and scaring investors away?

The review ordered by the President may come up with some answers.

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R.P. TUNA HIT HARD: A joint IMF and World Bank study has shown that protectionist measures are often aimed at products that developing countries are best able to make. These include textile, clothing and agricultural products.

Subsidies, anti-dumping measures, and other non-tariff barriers such as labeling requirements are blocking products from developing countries, including the Philippines.

Recently, the US took unfair action against our tuna industry when the US Congress approved the Andean Trade Preference Expansion Act. That law grants Andean countries such as Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru and other South American countries zero tariff for their tuna exports to the US.

With zero tariff for Andean tuna as against our canned tuna that is subjected to 6.5 to 12 percent tariff, the local industry expects to lose more than $125 million in export income over the next 10 years as a result of the discrimination.

President Arroyo mentioned this unfair move of the US when Secretary of State Colin Powell called on her recently. Powell just laughed it off and quipped that he never thought tuna would crop up in his high-level talks with GMA. He pretended not to know that that concern was very important to us.

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FALLING TARIFF REVENUES: While our agricultural products are losing markets, there has been no firm resolve to protect them — in contrast to what rich countries are doing for this sector. They are spending a reported $1 billion a day in agricultural subsidies.

At the rate cheaper imports have been coming in, we might end up simply folding many of our factories and just buying cheaper imported substitutes.

We get caught in a vicious cycle as increased importation leads to the fast erosion of our foreign reserves and the continued deterioration of the peso, the ballooning of dollar-denominated loans, the rise in the peso-price of raw materials, the deluge of cheaper imports, et cetera…

As of last year alone, tariff revenues reportedly fell to $2.03 billion mainly due to reduced tariffs. The average tariff rate has gone down by more than 300 percent over the last 10 years, from an average 19.7 percent in 1992 to 6.1 percent this year.

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CONCERN AT W.B.: Some officers of the World Bank meeting in Washington DC last Oct. 3 have accused rich countries of “hypocrisy” over trade policies that push developing countries to open their markets while not doing enough to open their own.

News from Washington quoted WB chief economist Nicholas Stern as saying that “it is hypocrisy to encourage poor countries to open their markets while imposing protectionist measures that cater to powerful special interest.” He said that rich countries should lead by example by opening their markets more to products from the developing world.

“Improving market access for developing countries is one of the most important steps that the rich countries could take to help fight global poverty,” he told a news conference at the annual meeting of the WB and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Former IMF deputy managing director Stanley Fischer echoed that rich countries should take their responsibilities by adopting trade policies less harmful to developing countries. “It is nothing short of a scandal what’s being done to developing countries,” he said.

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ANYBODY HERE CARES?: The Department of Environment and Natural Resources has declared 2002 as the International Year for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer.

The declaration delivers a strong message to the energy sector, public transport, and industries — the main sources of toxic air pollutants — to do their share in limiting, if not eradicating, the so-called greenhouse gases which have caused the thinning of the ozone layer.

The ozone layer is the protective mantle miles up in the atmosphere that shields the earth from harmful ultraviolet rays.

While public transport and industries have buckled under pressures from Congress and environmental lobby groups to comply with the critical provisions of the Clean Air Act, alas, the state-managed energy sector has failed in adhering to the basic mandate of the law.

The National Power Corp. has stubbornly clung to its highly pollutive coal-fired plants despite admonition by lawmakers and environmental watchdog against the toxins and carcinogens emitted by them.

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GREENHOUSE GASES: The Worldwatch Institute has reported that coal emits 29 percent more carbon per unit of energy than oil, and 80 percent more than natural gas.

Carbon dioxide, although non-toxic, represents a major portion of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Coal-fired plants account for 88 percent of CO₂ emissions, 99 percent of mercury emissions, 96 percent of sulfur dioxide emissions, and 93 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions.

Over the last 30 years, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has increased by 30 percent – resulting in the human-influenced phenomenon called global warming and the punching of a large hole in the ozone layer.

In September 2000, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ozone-monitoring satellite registered the biggest hole in the ozone layer ever observed in the Antarctic. The hole appeared above an area of about 10.9 million square miles, exceeding the previous record by more than 300,000 miles.

Aside from the so-called greenhouse gases, chloro-fluorocarbons and freon from old model refrigerators and air-conditioners have been blamed and banned for enlarging this “hole in the sky.”