Another aspiration

Yesterday I went to a large outlet of one of the top supermarket chains that committed to bring down the retail price of sugar to just P70 a kilo.

There was sugar at P70 a kilo all right… but it was washed (or premium raw) sugar, which has always been much cheaper than refined. The white refined, bearing the supermarket’s house brand, was priced at P98 a kilo, just slightly below the still prevailing market prices of P100 to P110.

It was worse in another major supermarket chain: washed sugar ranged from P88 to P93 a kilo depending on the brand; refined sugar was at P111 to a whopping P134 per one-kilo pack. At least the sugar shelves were full.

The commitment was to bring down the prices beginning this week. Maybe their week starts on Thursday or Friday.

It wasn’t entirely surprising. A day after the government announced that several major supermarket chains had agreed to retail refined sugar at P70 per kilo, I went to a supermarket near my home.

Not a single pack of refined sugar was on the shelf.

It’s one of the popular supermarket chains, but nowhere near the size of the SM group. I don’t know if it was among the supermarkets that made the commitment. And I couldn’t tell if the shelves had been emptied of white sugar because the owner had bought at a high price and didn’t want to sell at a loss, or because the usual consumer response to a supply shortage had kicked in again: panic buying. The supermarkets, after all, had committed to make the cheaper sugar available only “while supplies last.”

That purchase limit of a kilo per buyer, incidentally, made me wonder: what happens to the sugar that is packed in bags of 2.5 to five kilos? That’s the packing that I prefer for my white and brown sugars. The sugars that I buy in one-kilo or smaller 500-gram packs are muscovado, coco and caster. I buy confectioner’s sugar in small packaging only when the five-kilo packs are unavailable.

Will consumers pay P110 per kilo for the five-kilo bag of white sugar? Maybe the supermarket that I visited over the weekend simply decided to keep the bigger packs in storage, to avoid such questions from persnickety consumers like me. So the one-kilo packs quickly disappeared from the shelves.

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Under the proper temperature, packaging and environment, sugar, like non-iodized salt, has an indefinite shelf life, but is best only about two years upon opening.

Flour, even when packed in woven polypropylene bags with polyethylene liner to prevent moisture, can go rancid quickly, so hoarding can be a problem. Rice shelf life is also not indefinite. Packaged improperly, rice can attract weevils or bukbok and rodents. There are also rice sacks that aren’t waterproof, as we have seen in the past when mountains of rice were found damp and rotting in warehouses of the National Food Authority.

Ants are drawn to refined sugar, but waterproof plastic packaging keeps out ants. So sugar can be easily hoarded to manipulate supply and prices in the market.

Hoarding to create an artificial shortage is what Malacañang has blamed for the eye-watering prices of sugar all over the country.

The recent Customs “visitations” tend to stress that point, unless the warehouse owners have a valid explanation for those massive stores of refined sugar. Is the sugar officially classified for export, and the owners have no legal obligation to release the items to the domestic market?

Perhaps in a crisis, the government can compel the release to the domestic market of sugar allocated for export. But is there a sugar crisis? The government says even the shortage is artificial.

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Last Monday, Customs agents backed by military intelligence personnel raided two more warehouses, this time in Caloocan. They reported finding 13,000 sacks of sugar and 66,000 sacks of rice, reportedly imported from Thailand and Vietnam, whose combined value was estimated at P231 million.

The new undersecretary of the Department of Agriculture, balik-DA Domingo Panganiban, has said retail prices could go down to as low as P60 per kilo because of the availability of supplies at P70 a kilo. That’s nearly back to the P51 to P55 per kilo before prices began surging last year.

This will depend on whether the supplies are there, and if retailers’ cooperation is guaranteed.

Maybe something got lost in translation, like that order issued to resigned DA undersecretary Leocadio Sebastian by Executive Secretary Vic Rodriguez. The wording of the order authorized Sebastian to do what he did on sugar importation, but Malacañang says this wasn’t the case, and the “ES” has been moving to wash his hands of the mess.

The Office of the Press Secretary has been making it a point to emphasize that the “visitations” now being conducted on warehouses, which tend to prove that the sugar shortage is artificial and importation is therefore not needed, are on orders of Rodriguez.

But if the shortage is artificial, why has President Marcos agreed anyway to import P150,000 metric tons of sugar by October?

That’s still about six weeks away. If the market behaves as it has been doing, driven by supply and demand (plus fear and greed), entrepreneurs will have no choice but to raise soon the prices of food items that use sugar. These include items heavily consumed by the masses – pandesal and ordinary tasty, three-in-one instant coffee, affordable RC Cola, banana-Q and turon.

White sugar at P70 per kilo (even P60!) will then be just another aspiration, available only in news reports, or in your dreams.