FINALLY President Aquino has issued executive orders (EOs 179 and 180) on the recovered coco levies. Like the Marcos presidential decrees that mandated the collection of the coco levies, the Aquino EOs emphatically state the benefits of the coconut farmers in their policy declarations. Like the Marcos decrees, they assign the entire coco levy amount to the care of the Philippine Coconut Authority which is now under the Office of the Presidential Assistant for Food Security and Agricultural Modernization (Opafsam). The disappointing part, though, is that the coconut farmers’ role appears to have been limited again to merely being a subject of the policy declarations.
EO 179 governs the disposition and privatization of recovered coco levy-funded assets. This order mandates certain government agencies to audit and make an inventory of these assets, which should have been made a long time ago. It further directs the agencies to determine whether the sale of the levy-funded companies shall be “beneficial to government”; nowhere in the order says that the matter of whether the companies would benefit the farmers or the industry should be taken into account.
EO 180 provides the guidelines for the use of the recovered P71 billion from San Miguel Corp. While President Aquino agreed in a dialogue in November 2014, giving his open support of the coconut farmers’ call for the establishment of a Coconut Farmers’ Trust Fund to protect and preserve such fund, EO 180 opened the “floodgates” to the entire P71 billion. The only safeguard now is the President’s approval of a Coco Levy Roadmap on which PCA disbursements shall be based. While there were a number of meetings between Opafsam and the farmers’ groups in drawing the broad strokes of the Coco Levy Roadmap, the sector is totally blind as to what is up for approval by Malacañang. Unfortunate but not a surprise, as this is totally in line with the executive order that limits consultations with the sector to planning and program implementation.
This was how the coco levy scam was perpetrated so easily during martial law. Government had the sole right to the funds and no degree of transparency or participation from the coconut farming sector was ever required. Since the fall of the dictatorship, democracy has prevailed in the Philippines, but not for the poor Filipino coconut farmers, so it seems.
The two executive orders definitely fall short of the expectations of the farmers who marched from Davao City to Malacañang in 2014, which eventually highlighted the issue of the coconut levies. It took almost 30 years of struggle to recover a portion of the loot; without any mechanism to safeguard the P71-billion coco levy fund, the farmers are now apprehensive more than ever, especially with the 2016 elections in the horizon. Given these circumstances, a law passed by the 16th Congress, creating the Coconut Farmers’ Trust Fund is vital and immediately needed.
—VADESHNA SURIO,
program officer,
Coconut Industry Reform (COIR)
Movement Inc.,
coir_inc@yahoo.com