Coconut industry may collapse – lawmaker

MANILA, Philippines – A party-list lawmaker warned Friday the country’s multi-billion-peso coconut industry is in danger of collapse unless the government steps in and saves the sector, which has been the source of livelihood for some 24 million Filipinos for decades.

AAMBIS-OWA party-list Rep. Sharon Garin said unless the government acts now to save the industry, “what is traditionally known as the tree of life might end up as the tree of despair.”

Garin said the weak institutional, policy, technical and financial support from the government has exacerbated the numerous problems besetting the coconut industry—ranging from decreasing production due to senile trees, illegal logging, poor fertilization, mono-cropping and too much focus on copra.

She said the lack of training and education as components of capacity building has also severely affected the coconut industry and the coconut farmers.

“As a result of this, 70 percent of our farmers only tend and harvest coconuts in their farms when coconut farms have great potential for inter-cropping. The vast area under the coconut canopy can and should be utilized to plant corn, cacao, bananas, calamansi, abaca, and other crops and can even be used for livestock-raising,” Garin said.

She said high-value products may be derived from coconut such as coconut sugar, coir, fiber, peat and charcoal but most coconut farmers only sell copra.

“Because of this, our coconut farmers who are mostly into copra production, of which 80 percent is exported, are dependent on the volatile international market of commodity oil,” Garin said.

“All these coupled by inadequate government support have sent the coconut industry spiraling downwards,” she said.

She sought the long overdue release of the controversial P200 billion coco levy funds. “Must we keep waiting for the said release and not act while the Philippine coconut industry is sliding down unto a flop of ruins?” Garin said.

But with or without the coconut levy funds, she said reforms in policies and allocations must sweep the government from top to bottom at the soonest possible time.

She lamented the low yearly subsidy given the Philippine Coconut Authority. “The Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) has a yearly subsidy of around P500 million, equivalent to a mere 1.5 percent of the total allocation of the Department of Agriculture. Just 1.5 percent allocation for one of the biggest agricultural industries of the country,” she said.

She urged the Department of Agriculture for more policy interventions on the coconut industry, which covers a total Lawmaker warns… From B-1

coconut area of 3.4 million hectares, an area that corresponds to about one-third of the country’s arable agriculture land, higher than those of rice and corn.

“As the number one agricultural export, coconuts account for nearly half of our agricultural exports, but unfortunately the abundance of the resources is inversely related to the state of the coconut industry and the coconut farmers,” she said.

She said what is unfortunate is that coconut has the lowest farm value per hectare among crops. Depending on the crop yield and prices, an average coconut farmer would earn only about P15,000 per hectare per year.

“Thus an average coconut farm of 2.4 hectares will only earn a coconut farmer P36,000 per year that translates to a monthly income of P3,000 which means that coconut farmers and their families are surviving on a budget of P20 per person per day,” she said.

“The alarming fact is that areas such as the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), Caraga, Region 4-B, Bicol, Eastern Visayas, and Zamboanga Peninsula which are highly coconut dependent tend to have the highest poverty incidence in the country,” Garin said. –Paolo Romero (The Philippine Star)