Here’s How To Motivate Poor Coconut Farmers To Enrich Themselves – Using Their Own Coconuts Using Coco Levy Fund!
You know the coconut farmers are the poorest of Filipino farming
communities. And they themselves know that; Danny
Carranza, a member of the Katarungan
group, says so, says Madelaine B Miraflor
(25 October 2020, “Coconut Farmers Are Poorest Agri People[1],” MB.com.ph): “Carranza blamed the coconut
farmers’ poverty on the low copra prices, inability to intercrop and modernize.”
This
time I am not discussing who is to blame for whose poverty; instead, I want to
excite the poor farmers from Aparri to Zamboanga to excite themselves to get
their families out of the poverty trap!
How? Look at the above images again:
We will
make the poor coconut families enjoy their lives via Facebook! Let me tell you
how we will do it without spending a single peso of our own, but of theirs.
Know then, if you don’t know yet, a news release from the Department of Agriculture
(DA) says President Rodrigo Duterte
signed last Friday, 26 February, RA 11524, the Coconut Farmers and Industry
Trust Fund Act, and Secretary of Agriculture William
Dar said that “the law will pave way for the efficient use of the
multi-billion-peso coconut levy to uplift the (lives) of millions of farmers
and sustain the development of the country’s coconut industry.”
RA 11524 provides for a 50-year trust fund. There is a
management committee (Mancom) composed of representatives of the Department of
Finance, Department of Budget Management, and Department of Justice. Says the DA
news release:
The (Mancom) is tasked
to set investment priorities, investment themes, asset allocation and policies;
evaluate assets; issue guidelines for portfolio turnover and (Mancom) expenses…and
approve financial requirements.
Such power! Now, let us test the will of those
top-management people in enriching the coconut farmers in the Philippines. Let
the workings of RA 11524 come up with funds so that:
With
gifts of 1 laptop and 4 cellphones and some training, each registered coconut
farmer family is transformed into delighted Facebook Families!
The laptop will be shared by the father and mother; the
cellphones will be distributed among the children. Facebook away!
To keep the spirit of this exercise in fertility, those
laptops and cellphones can neither be
sold, pawned, nor exchanged for
anything, not even food.
Remember: Those families are actually the owners of the
coconut levy fund, the source of the money to buy those hardware. So, what we
are gifting them are actually their own money, but which they cannot get hold
of otherwise.
With Facebook, the family will learn to love life and enjoy
it more, even if poor. And this will motivate them to think of how coconut families
can enrich their members. So, now they will listen when we agriculturists tell
them to practice such as:
(1) Multiple
cropping – interplanting coconut groves with high-value vegetable crops
(2) Value adding – producing virgin coconut oil
(3) Changing varieties – planting high-yielding varieties.
Truly
then, the poor farmers we shall not
always have with us!@517
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