PANGASINAN, 7 April 2008 — Philippines and South Korea have agreed to finalize details of a proposed seafood processing facility in Dagupan City. South Korea’s aid implementing agency will provide a $2.2 million grant to set up the facility.
The Department of Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said a survey team from the Korea International Cooperation Agency (KOICA) visited the country recently to work out the details of this seafood-processing project.
During this visit, the agriculture secretary, the KOICA team, led by Kim In, and Dagupan City Mayor Alipio Fernandez Jr. discussed the measures needed to guarantee the successful implementation of the project. Korean technology is to be tapped to improve the facilitation and processing of seafood exports from the Pangasinan port.
Yap said the plant would be built over a 1,500-square-meter area. The plant will include packing, heating and smoking equipment; quick-freeze and ice-making facilities; air showers, sterilizers and other sanitary equipment.
The project, he said, would include training of Filipino technical personnel in Korea to equip them with skills to operate, manage and maintain the processing plant.
Besides the Dagupan seafood processing facility, Yap said Korea would also provide assistance to other development projects in the Philippines.
Korea, he said, had already helped Philippines by excluding Philippine bananas from the list of products subject to its 10 percent adjustment tariff on imports.
The exemption of Philippine bananas from the payment of this adjusted tariff duties, effective Jan. 1, lifted the quantitative restrictions imposed by South Korea on this import.
A consistent top market for the country’s fresh and processed products, South Korea used to impose a 30 percent basic tariff on Philippine bananas.
Prior to Jan. 1, 2007, it had also imposed a 10 percent adjustment rate on bananas, the only fruit subject to this kind of tariff, making it a quantitative restriction to discourage imports of this fruit.
This adjustment tariff was a “distorted trade practice,” considering that Korea has no banana industry to protect because the fruit is not grown in “commercially meaningful” quantities in that country.
