Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto reminded Congress and the Duterte administration to restore the “Buy Filipino” provision in the annual budget, starting with the bulk purchase of protective face masks against Covid.
The senator rued the bulk purchase of “billions of pesos of personal protective equipment [PPE], face shields and masks from China—when better quality locally produced ones were available at a far lower price.”
In a news statement issued on Wednesday, the Senate President Pro Tempore stressed the need for Congress to restore the “Buy Filipino” provision in the national budget.
The lawmaker lamented that the provision, long adopted in the general appropriations laws proposed and signed by previous presidents from Ferdinand Marcos to Benigno Aquino III, “disappeared in the 2014 national budget.”
“Before its scrapping,” Recto recalled, “the Buy Filipino provision mandates government to prioritize the procurement of Philippine-made products.”
The Senate President Pro Tempore stressed that the Buy Filipino provision should be “put back in the national budget to help struggling domestic manufacturers keep operating and meet payroll during the pandemic.”
He stressed that if the Buy Filipino provision was part of the 2020 national budget, “foreign carpetbaggers” would not have been able to corner government’s bulk procurement of face shields, PPEs and masks last year.
“It would have provided some deterrence,” Recto said.
The senator suggested that “in the wake of the calamitous domination by a fly-by-night, undercapitalized, zero track record foreign-owned company in a big PS-DBM-DOH [Procurement Service—Department of Budget and Management—Department of Health] contract, a united Senate should reinstate the Buy Philippine-made provision in the 2022 national budget.”
Recto asserted that “pandemic or not, there is a vibrant domestic manufacturing industry that can supply the government’s annual shopping list of supplies and equipment.”
Depicting the government as a big supplies and equipment buyer, with a budget in the hundreds of billions annually, he notes the annual purchases range “from soap to cars, from paper to guns, [that] government buys these in bulk.”
Recto recalled that when the Buy Filipino provision made its last appearance in the 2013 General Appropriations Act, it stated that “priority shall be given to the purchase of locally produced and manufactured materials to be undertaken either by administration or by contract.”
Covered by the rule, he noted, were “foreign-assisted projects whose covering loan agreements expressly allow or do not prohibit the same.”
If the quality of the locally produced and manufactured material is sub-standard compared with its imported counterpart, he added, then importation was also allowed.
Recto added: “The third exception was if no locally produced and manufactured material is available as certified by the Department of Trade and Industry.”
“As you can see,” he noted, “it was a balanced rule,” adding that “while preference was stipulated, it was not a blanket mandate to buy pricey local lemons simply because they’re made by Filipinos.”
Image credits: DTI-Aurora