Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III ordered the Bureau of Customs to create a special strike team to guard against the entry of waste materials that other countries are attempting to dump in the country.
Dominguez issued the directive during a recent DOF executive committee meeting after Customs Commissioner Rey Leonardo Guerrero reported that he had called on his counterparts in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to strengthen the law enforcement capabilities of the organization’s member-states not only in the war against drug trafficking but also in preventing the region from being a dumping ground for hazardous materials such as garbage of other countries.
Guerrero said his fellow Customs officials from the ASEAN member-states reacted positively to his proposal.
In response, Dominguez said “it’s time we put up something like an environmental unit in the Customs [bureau] to really act on this garbage issue.”
Dominguez said the strike team that he wants at the BOC would be similar to a special environmental strike force team that will be activated to guard the entry of hazardous materials in the country.
Guerrero also reported to Dominguez that other ASEAN member-states like Malaysia have thanked the Philippines during the 28thmeeting of the ASEAN Directors-General of Customs held at the Lao Republic for setting the example in the region when President Rodrigo Duterte stood pat in his decision to compel Canada to immediately repatriate 69 containers of trash that were dumped in Manila six years ago.
After Canada failed to meet the original May 15 deadline set by President Duterte for the return of the imported wastes, the government recalled its ambassador and consuls to Canada to demonstrate its “diminished diplomatic relations” with the North American country.
This action prompted Canada to move its earlier June 30 commitment in repatriating the waste to the Philippines’ revised May 30 deadline.
Other ASEAN countries like Malaysia and Cambodia are also working to have wastes dumped in their countries returned to Canada.
Guerrero said that as a result of President Duterte’s tough stand on the issue, he has received reports that plans to have other shipments of wastes transported to the country have now been scuttled.
Beating the deadline set by the government, the 69 containers of waste from Canada mislabeled by a private importer as recyclable materials and dumped in the Philippines six years ago were finally shipped out of the country last May 31.
The South Korean government has also committed to help ship back to its country some 5,176 metric tons of waste materials illegally imported here last year and currently stored at the PHIVIDEC Industrial Authority premises in Misamis Oriental.