At this point, are we still on ‘daang matuwid’?

This is a true story. It highlights the incompetence and indifference of an ossified bureaucracy deeply mired in greed and tenure. It is a story involving the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA).

It also involves Allan Wu, a Taiwanese businessman who has been in the Philippines for around 15 years. Drawing on his experience as a liver cancer researcher, he developed and introduced many other products like an all-purpose cleaner and herbal healing element called Blue Miracle. Some years back, the PCA tested one of his products, Miracle Soil Conditioner (MSC). Trials showed the product performing marvelously, increasing annual coconut yields from 43 nuts to as much as 120 nuts. But it didn’t become an instant hit, which conjures up all sorts of reasons as to how an excellent product can languish when it has no “influential” backers or “promotional” budgets.

Still, his increasing interest in Philippine agriculture led Wu to develop more products like Miracle Power Granules and Miracle Plant Solutions. After some serendipitous coincidences involving the undersigned, some PCA officials, a Batangas businessman-planter and Wu in March 2013, PCA’s Administrator Euclides G. Forbes had MPS scheduled for testing as a way to combat the virulent coconut disease that had already infected over a million of Calabarzon’s coconut palms. Forbes admitted to Wu that PCA was “desperate and willing to try anything” since the team assigned to work on this had come up with nothing despite having spent P20 million and was now asking for an additional budget of P50 million.

Graciously, Wu accepted the Forbes invitation and worked with the PCA technical team to get MPS tested in April given the urgency of the problem. Generously, he spent his own resources and mobilized several private contacts so as not to unduly burden the PCA. Last April 2, initial trials began at PCA’s Alaminos nursery in Laguna. A parallel, simultaneous trial set for Balete, Batangas, at the Tarnate plantation was delayed and subsequently scrapped by a PCA technical man, who also stopped the Alaminos trial a week later, invoking the danger of phytotoxicity supposedly caused by MPS. To date, no scientific evidence has been offered to substantiate the claim of phytotoxicity. The same technical man who filed a very sloppy one-page report to stop the test has been claiming he has developed a cure for the disease. We certainly hope so. If he has not, he has a lot of explaining to do.

In fact, even if he does have a solution (which we doubt), there is still the question of how to treat research partners and foreign investors when it comes to joint efforts like the MPS tests. The high-handed and sneaky manner by which the MPS tests were sabotaged by the PCA’s own technical men opens a can of worms. We hope that Forbes as well as Agriculture Secretary Proceso Alcala get to the bottom of this as soon as possible.

This early, many are betting that this will end in a whitewash because of the insidious power of corrupt bureaucrats.

—JOSE OSIAS,

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