THE Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) in Western Visayas pushed for the rationalization of regulatory fees to further boost entrepreneurs in the region.
Rebecca Rascon, regional director of DTI-Western Visayas, said part of the agency’s strategy to capacitate local micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) is ensuring that their products are compliant to regulatory policies and standards.
Rascon said that enterprises cannot sell their products among supermarkets without the license to operate issued by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
“The perennial problem, however, is that small entrepreneurs cannot afford to pay especially the Certificate of Product Registration (CPR),” she added.
For one CPR, an enterprise needs to pay at least P22,000 per product.
“So what if you have three products to register, it would surely mean higher cost,” Rascon said.
As initial step to address this concern, Rascon said the Regional Small and Medium Development (SMED) Council has already come up with a resolution asking the FDA to implement a rationalization scheme.
This means that those small entrepreneurs who want to secure license to operate from the FDA should have a different payment rate from those of bigger enterprises.
“The FDA should develop a scheme providing different fees for enterprises depending on their scale, basically lower for small ones,” Rascon said, adding that the resolution was already submitted to the National SMED Council.
The DTI-Western Visayas official then urged the Provincial SMED Council of Negros Occidental to come up with its own resolution to strengthen the request on prodding the FDA to rationalize regulatory fees.
Aside from compliance to regulation, DTI-Western Visayas had earlier said they are banking on continuous product development, improving production, and opening more markets to make local MSMEs become more competitive amid the challenges brought by the Asean integration. (EPN)