By Manny Piñol
Secretary of Agriculture
City of Piura, Peru – Halfway around the world in this Peruvian agricultural region where I am attending the agriculture ministers’ pre-APEC meeting, I read a report which accused President Rody Duterte of not keeping his promise to release the Coconut Levy Funds.
“Malacañang, Congress and the Senate are now too engrossed with the drug war while millions of coconut farmers, most of them old, sickly and dying, are still waiting for the return of the coco levy, as [Mr. Duterte] promised during the campaign,’’ Maribel Luzara, president of Kilusang Magbubukid sa Bondoc Peninsula, was quoted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer on Sunday.
Luzara also said that then Presidential candidate Duterte promised to release the coco levy funds during the first 100 days of his administration during a sortie in Quezon Province last March.
Now, I was not there during that sortie so I could not validate whether he or his running mate Alan Peter Cayetano really said they would release the funds during the first 100 days of the Duterte Presidency.
Knowing that both President Duterte and Sen. Cayetano are lawyers, I doubt whether they really said that because they know that releasing the Coconut Levy Funds would have to go through Congress and the Senate.
That is a lengthy, contentious and tedious process.
Has Pres. Duterte really forgotten his promise to release the Coconut Levy Funds?
Sorry, Maribel but you may not have been reading the news lately.
In the last Cabinet meeting on Sept. 14, Pres. Duterte issued a directive to me, as Secretary of Agriculture, and Sec. Adelino Sitoy, the new Presidential Legislative Liaison Officer (PLLO), to work on the details and the mechanics on how to release the Coconut Levy Funds estimated to be over P90-B.
The President said that as soon as the details are readied, Sec. Sitoy and I should coordinate closely with the stakeholders, Congress and the Senate to implement the release of the funds.
There was urgency in President Duterte’s order not only because he made a commitment during the campaign to release the funds but because the Coconut Industry in Basilan, and recently even Sulu and main island Mindanao, is now threatened by the destructive insect called “Cocolisap.”
President Duterte is looking at the Coco Levy as the source of funds to save and rehabilitate the coconut industry.
Immediately, I directed Undersecretary Segfredo Serrano of the Dept. of Agriculture to form a technical working group composed of all the top level officials of the department to implement President Duterte’s directive.
Before I left for Dubai and Peru Thursday last week, the TWG had already met and started working on the details on how much should be initially released, who should receive, and in what form should the Coco Levy Funds be given.
As soon as I return from the APEC agriculture ministers’ meeting here, I will convene the TWG and set a meeting with PLLO Sec. Sitoy so that the initial engagements with the stakeholders and the legislators would be started.
So, to Maribel Luzara: We are working on President Duterte’s promise, Mam.
Rody Duterte does not forget and modesty aside, I am a very fast worker.
But you have to understand that we have to exercise extreme prudence and care in handling this very sensitive and explosive issue which has dragged on for over 30 years now.
Or else, this could explode in our faces and do more harm to the Coconut farmers and their dependents rather than give them long overdue justice.
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