The new head of the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), Director General Nela Charade G. Puno, should be warned that she and her agency may be caught in the crossfire as warring business and political interests bring the fight to her territory.
The issue is the reevaluation and recertification process for two contraceptive devices. So-called pro-life and Church-backed groups raised a howl against these contraceptives and succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court (SC) to slap a temporary restraining order (TRO) on their sale and distribution.
President Duterte publicly lambasted the SC for issuing the TRO and putting the government’s reproductive-health program in jeopardy.
The SC has said the fate of that TRO is in FDA’s hands. All the FDA has to do is to reevaluate the two contraceptives and recertify them as safe and do not induce abortion. Once the recertification is issued by the FDA, the SC said it will lift the TRO.
Because of this, the agency and its head have become the object of negative propaganda campaign on various fronts.
Puno should now exercise greater prudence. If not, the reforms in the FDA she managed to put in place within a short period of time could all go down the drain.
The thrust of the propaganda campaign seems to be to portray Puno as “lacking in transparency”. This is the best way to demolish the public’s confidence in the reevaluation process involving the two contraceptives. By questioning the process, opposition to the recertification of the said contraceptives gets a new lease on life.
Of course, many cannot understand the howl against alleged lack of transparency in the reevaluation process now being done by the FDA.
After all, the FDA appears to have given the interested parties enough time to submit their evidence and arguments against the contraceptives. They were also given information regarding the reevaluation process.
Puno should be advised that the forthcoming debates on this issue will center on how the FDA supposedly did the reevaluation and not on the technical results of the process. This is what makes the whole strategy against the FDA smack of politics.
This is expected and Puno should know that there are powerful interests who will do everything to stop the government’s program on reproductive health.
Pharmaceutical industry sources say Puno is in the same “hit list” of a powerful multinational firm doing business in the country.
She should be told that the name of the game is power and not competence. Her ability to conduct an expert evaluation of the contraceptives involved cannot be questioned. After all, she is a pharmacist—one trained to look into the tiniest components of a medicine and consider their effects.
Her baptism of fire is on an arena outside of her technical expertise —politics.
Anti-poor bias in tax proposal
ON September 20 the Senate Committee on Ways and Means officially endorsed Senate Bill 1592, or Tax Reform for Acceleration and Inclusion (TRAIN), the first phase of the Comprehensive Tax Reform Program.
The TRAIN, however, could take away a whopping third of the hard-earned income of those already living dangerously near the poverty line.
“It’s not going to be that bad,” says Sen. Juan Edgardo M. Angara, chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means and principal sponsor of TRAIN. But it appears he has callously dismissed the plight of sari-sari store owners and their families who stand to suffer from the burden of additional taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs).
The proposed taxes for SSBs will effectively increase the prices of common sari-sari store stock like powdered juice, soft drinks, energy drinks and other sweetened beverages. For instance, a packet of powdered juice costs P9 in your neighborhood store; if this tax bill becomes law, that small packet that makes a liter of juice will cost P20.
The taxes on SSBs and the inevitable price increases would radically transform the spending habits of Filipinos in the lower-income bracket, who make up 80 percent of SSB consumers.
If you take away the already limited spending power of the D and E section of the population, you are basically stealing the livelihood of the stores that cater to them.
The average sari-sari store earns about P800 on a good day. Based on research conducted by the Nielsen Corp., 31 percent of a sari-sari store’s daily sales consist of soft drinks alone. What happens when their customers can’t afford these drinks? That’s roughly P250 a day taken away from hardworking families who already don’t have much in life in the first place.
Angara conveniently forgets that the majority of Filipinos don’t have the luxury of letting go of P250 per day from an already alarmingly small income with which they sustain themselves. That’s P250 that could go to food for their families, or for tuition. We ask: Can Angara and his family live on P550 a day?
Angara asserts that 84 percent of the Duterte administration’s “Build, Build, Build” infrastructure program can be generated from other sources apart from funds generated by the TRAIN. The question then is: Why is it being rushed?
Angara likes to be known as an ardent advocate of tax reforms who wants to help workers and families save and to promote social justice. That is really hard to believe now that he appears very eager to further burden the very people he promised to protect from higher taxes.
If the Lower House of Congress is already perceived as a rubber stamp, the Filipino people deserve better from the Senate whose members should be more discerning when it comes to protecting the people’s welfare.
E-mail: ernhil@yahoo.com.