Still beyond their reach

More waiting ahead. That’s the disheartening message millions of Filipino coconut farmers got from the recent announcement by the Aquino administration that it would not, for the moment, take action on the almost P85 billion worth of sequestered shares of the giant conglomerate San Miguel Corp. that the Supreme Court has ruled belongs to the government, which is mandated to hold them in trust for the farmers. The high court further specified that the money is “to be used only for the benefit of all coconut farmers, and for the development of the coconut industry.”

Loud and clear. But what confounding noise and fog the issue of the coconut levy funds has been enshrouded in all these years, such that, nearly four decades after the government of the strongman Ferdinand Marcos began collecting cash from impoverished coconut farmers supposedly to develop the industry, and with the levy now worth billions, not a cent has grazed the hand of any coconut tiller anywhere. Instead, from the outset, a nearly impenetrable thicket was built around the levy, in the form of incestuous business arrangements involving dozens of companies, subsidiaries and such through which the funds were said to have been held and managed.

Or mismanaged, because while the levy gave the likes of Marcos associate numero uno Eduardo Cojuangco the leverage to found a sprawling business empire apparently bankrolled by the farmers’ hard-earned cash—from the United Coconut Planters Bank of which Cojuangco was founding president and CEO, to various firms, companies and mills that in time would collectively own, on paper, some 47 percent of SMC, another Cojuangco-controlled business—the coconut industry, meanwhile, saw only decline and deprivation through the years.

Coconut is still grown in 60 provinces, with an estimated 3.5 million farmers and some 20 million Filipinos—a quarter of the country’s population, mostly its “poorest of the poor”—dependent on the industry. Their livelihood, however, is in danger of collapse, “wracked by falling harvests as a result of senile trees, fertilization problems and the adverse impact of climate change,” as the Inquirer recently reported. Many of the farmers who paid the mandatory levy between 1972 and 1982 are also either old or dead, their claim to just restitution from the government still tied up in endless, convoluted court cases that have, in the meantime, made millionaires of sundry lawyers, accountants and government bureaucrats, while the intended beneficiaries themselves have sunk further into poverty.

The Supreme Court had provided a glimmer of hope with its ruling that the almost P85-billion bloc, or some 24 percent of the SMC shares, does indeed belong to the farmers, care of the government that must now put in place a viable mechanism to distribute the proceeds of such funds. However, the Philippine Coconut Producers Federation, or Cocofed, promptly threw a monkey wrench into the proceedings by appealing the ruling, saying the bloc belonged to 1 million unnamed farmers under its wing. (Who are these farmers?) That pending appeal, says Malacañang, is what prevents it at present from immediately unfreezing the funds to lend direct help to the struggling tillers.

Cojuangco, meanwhile, can rest easy. His lawyers have also persuaded the Supreme Court that 20 percent of the original 47 percent of SMC shares (later whittled down to 24) that used to be owned by companies he himself established to manage the coconut levy funds is—wouldn’t you know it—his and not the farmers’. The P58-billion shares  were “legally acquired,” in the high court’s wording, setting aside the charge that Cojuangco had illegally dipped his hands into money deposited at UCPB to purchase the bloc. A dissenting justice, now Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, minced no words in calling the decision the “joke of the century.”

It doesn’t take extraordinary intelligence to see the epic injustice of this setup. The money extracted from the sweat and labor of millions of Filipino coconut farmers has enriched just about everyone, except the farmers themselves. The Aquino administration must lend priority to righting this massive wrong, not least because a large part of the national economy remains rooted in the industry that’s been blighted by a combination of natural and patently manmade afflictions. Sen. Joker Arroyo is right to ask: “After 25 years of waiting, will the coconut farmers ever regain the monies mandatorily levied on them? The prospects are obscure and their wait will remain.”