Who is a Coconut Farmer? In 1982, fresh from College as a COCOFED scholar, I worked as a research assistant-community organizer in Gangahin, Pitogo, Quezon, under the Center for Community Services of Ateneo de Manila University. We were doing a participatory research among 17 coconut farmer-tenants in the village. There I met Tatay Desto, who was in his late forties, a migrant from Bicol. Most tenants in the village were Bicolanos. Tatay Desto was tending a hectare of coconut land owned by a businessman residing in the town proper, five kilometers from the farm. The main product of the farm was copra- a dried coconut meat sold to middlemen then sent to a coconut mill in Lucena City to be manufactured as refined, bleached, deodorized (RBD) coconut oil which we use in cooking our favourite dishes. Coconut oil accounts to 20% of vegetable oils globally and the Philippines is the number one exporter accounting 65% of total global export mainly exported to Europe and transformed into many other uses including margarines, soaps, detergents, shampoos, etc. the copra cake (around 30%), left after extracting the oil from copra, is used for livestock feeds. Producing copra or dried coconut meat entailed a week-long laborious eleven-step process by the entire family of Tatay Desto before it was translated to cash. 1. Tatay Desto, accompanied by his wife and sometimes children, would prepare the koprasan by digging out some ten cubic meters of earth then putting bamboo sheets on top of the hole to serve as the drying area platform of the coconut meat. Woods and coconut shells would then be put in the hole below to be lit later on. This was a 2- day work for Tatay Desto and family. 2. The second step saw Tatay Desto maneuvering his 50 feet tall-kawit (bamboo pole with hooked knife on top) against the wind and sunshine and falling bits of debris to take bunches of coconuts down. This was a skill he learned over the years, and he was then getting worried about his eyes, very vulnerable to sun and debris exposure. The coconuts would drop and scatter to different directions. On the average he would get seven coconuts per tree in a 150 tree/hectare farm. This would take him a whole day work. 3. The third step was ipon, Tatay Desto and family would then gather all the 1,000 coconuts he felled from 150 trees in the farm and bring them all to the koprasan through a carabao slid (paragos). Tatay Destos farm had 150 trees, though the ideal for a hectare was 100 trees, most of them were very tall and sinile. One coconut tree produces 40 nuts yearly or ten coconuts every quarter on the average and four nuts would make a kg of copra. Pag-iipon of 1,000 felled nuts would take the family half day. 4. Then Tatay Desto would do the fourth step: tapas, de-husking by banging the coconut into a mounted pointed steel , then pushing the nut down, separating in the process the husk from the shelled coco meat and water. His hand thickened by years of working on the nuts, he would be able to finish 1,000 nuts in a day, though younger and experienced farmworkers could finish more than 2,000 nuts a day. 5. Then doing the fifth step( biyak), Tatay Desto would use a bolo to break the coconuts into two, draining the water out as waste. This would take Tatay Desto a half-day work for 1,000 nuts. 6. The sixth step was luto the careful piling of the halved coconuts on top of the koprasan then lighting the piled wood or coco shells in the hole. Cooking or drying would take at least four hours for a thousand nuts, as the heat must be carefully controlled, or attended very well, otherwise, the coconuts might burn. Tatay Destos family members would take turn in doing the vigil--with continuous smoke emitting from the hole hurting their eyes. 7. The seventh step, tigkal, was the separation of the dried coconut meat from the shell through a tigkalan, a small curved flat steel, and would take Tata Desto and his wife, some three hours for the 1,000 coconuts. 8. The eight step was pagtutusta, putting back the semi-dried coconut meat, now without the shell, on top of the koprasan, for further drying, another three hours. The target was to get the moisture content to the barest minimum (6-8%) for longer shelf-life. 9. Then the ninth step: the pagsasako or putting the copra into the sacks which usually entailed the chopping of the whole meat first so every sack would be able to accommodate more kilograms of copra. One thousand nuts would produce 180-250 kgs of copra, and would need four sacks at around 60 kgs per sack. This takes a couple of hour-work for Tatay Desto and wife. 10. Then the tenth step, pagparagos, using a carabao and a slid, the sacks filled with copra would be brought by Tatay Desto to the village copra-buyer by the road, a kilometer and a half away. It would take two deliveries since the carabao could only take two sacks or around 120 kgs. Walking slower than humans, the carabao would reach the buying station around an hour later, thus with two deliveries, would take Tatay Desto four full hours. 11. The last step, the eleventh step, was the bayaran or the actual paying which would still involve the de-sacking or putting out all the copra from the sack, the sorting, and the weighing. The village copra buyer (the pistonero) would pay Tatay Desto ten percent lower than the prevailing price because Tatay Desto , in need for cash to buy rice and other household consumption needs, usually got loans from the copra buyer. Every sack (however light it was) would be charged one kilo (called tara) and would be subtracted from the final weight of copra, in this case, four kgs would be subtracted. If the buyer thought the moisture of some copra were still not fully cooked, he would still do necessary subtractions. Then the final payment is given after subtracting the loan of Tatay Desto for the quarter. The price of copra was determined by global supply and demand, so price was erratic. During that time, Tatay Destos 250 kgs of copra would be bought by the village copra buyer at 60 pesos per hundred kgs. With tersiyuhan as the sharing arrangement, meaning 2/3 would go to the landlord and the 1/3 to the farmer-tenant, Tatay Desto would receive P20 from the 60-peso sale per hundred kilos or 50 pesos from total 250 kgs sold during that quarter. But the actual price then was not 60 pesos per 100 kgs. It was 160 pesos. Unknown to Tatay Desto, a coco levy or tax reached 100 pesos that year. Imposed through various Presidential Decrees of Marcos for every first sale of copra, collection started in 1973 and ended in 1982. The town copra consolidator would send his truck to the villages and get the village copra buyers consolidated copras and store them in a warehouse, waiting for the price to spike up before delivering them to an oil mill in Lucena City, 77 kilometers away. The major coconut mills in the country then were already bought by Danding Cojuangco (a crony of Marcos and the main architect of the scheme/scam) using the coco levy fund, and had become a monopoly, thus, the mills would be the ones to deliver the levy/tax to the Philippine Coconut Authority, then to the depository bank, United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB), also bought by the coco levy fund. In short for every eight pesos worth of copra produced by Tatay Desto and family, and all the eleven-stage labor put over a week, he and familiy would only get one peso, two pesos would go to his businessman-landlord who never put any labor at all, and five pesos would go to the Coco levy Fund controlled then by the group of inter-locking directorates of Danding Cojuangco, Enrile, Lobregat and ACCRA lawyers led by Angara. The Coco levy Fund was supposed to help develop the coconut industry and the millions of coconut farmers. But a significant amount of the fund was used instead to enrich a few and invested elsewhere. Some 1.6 billion pesos of the total 9.7 billion pesos collected over nine years was used to buy San Miguel Corporation shares which businesses had no relation at all with the coconut industry nor the coconut farmers. Another one was the United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) which gave loans only to farmers owning five hectares and above, prioritizing big businesses, and dis-enfranchising most coconut farmers , including Tatay Desto who was tilling less than two hectares. In the minds of Danding Cojuangco, Enrile, Lobregat, etc, the coconut farmer was defined as the one who owned the land. Thus Tatay Desto, a tenant farm worker who with his family practically produced the copra through a back-breaking 11-step process could not be considered a farmer and therefore beneficiaries of the Fund. It was the landlord businessman, who owned the land and all the other landowner-members of the Coconut Farmers Federation or COCOFED led by the cronies, who were considered coconut farmers and therefore beneficiaries of the Coco levy Fund. Part of the coco levy fund went to scholarships and insurance which benefited a few thousand sons and daughters of COCOFED members and their relatives out of more than a million COCOFED members . I was one of a hundred lucky COCOFED scholars that entered Ateneo. My father owned two hectares of coconut land. He was a retired government employee when I got the COCOFED scholarship. On the night of February 25th, 1986, the fourth night of the People Power Revolution, helicopters left Malacanang straight to Hawaii. Inside the helicopters were the First Family and the family of Danding Cojuangco. Ecstatic, and rejoicing with millions in front of Malacanang palace, I could not then believe, they were finally gone. But that was short-lived. A couple of years after, Danding was back in the country and a week after Estrada was sworn to office, Danding was appointed Chair of San Miguel Corporation and never lost it again, even after the 2nd People Power in 2001. The Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) filed several cases against Danding, Enrile, Lobregat, et al in soon after the revolution. On April 2011, 26 years after, the Supreme Court, on a 7-4-4 vote, decided to award 20 percent of SMC shares bought by coco levy fund (now estimated to be around 80-90 billion pesos) to Danding Cojuangco!!! The Supreme Court decision cited that government, thru the PCGG, failed to prove that Mr. Eduardo Cojuangco Jr. was a crony of former President Marcos and that the money used to acquire his SMC shares were ill-gotten. Justice Carpio Morales, in a dissenting opinion said: It was the biggest joke that hit the century. On January 24, 2012, the same Supreme Court voted unanimously (14-0 ) to award 24% of SMC shares or 71 billion pesos (at 75 pesos per preferred share), to the government on behalf of the coconut farmers and the coconut industry. This time, there was a definition of ill-gotten wealth used in the ruling. But while Danding got his 20% already, the government has not made a decision on the utilization and management of the recovered 24% paid already by SMC to the government and has been deposited in the national treasury and the UCPB for the past two years. In 2007, I went back to Gangahin, Pitogo, Quezon. Tatay Desto was still alive but ageing and sickly and was still a tenant. I wish to visit him this month to tell him about the #71KM Martsa ng Magniniyog. I just hope he is still alive. The KM71 Coconut Farmers Trust Fund March is a 1,750-km 71-day (September 17-November 28, 2014) long march from Davao City to Malacanang led by 71 coconut farmers from KILUS Magniniyogs member federations aimed to convince the President to sign a draft Executive Order and to certify as urgent legislation the establishment of a perpetual Coconut Farmers Trust Fund to manage and utilize the initially- recovered P71 billion Cocolevy Fund , now in the National Treasury and UCPB, to help develop 3.5 million coconut farmers and the coconut industry. Please see their open letter to the President below. Petition on-line at change.org is currently making the rounds in the FB network and may you sign up and convince your FB friends to do likewise. More information can be found at their FB page: KM71 Martsa ng Magniniyog. Their success depends so much from small acts of thousands if not millions who start to care about the coconut farmers, the poorest among the poor in Philippine society, according to the National Anti-Poverty Commission. #KM71MartsangMagniniyog
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:30:47 +0000
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