Conclusion
DAVAO CITY—When women move, they tame even the fierce warriors from among their midst. Literally.
What used to be a battleground of the mujahideen (fighters) drenched in blood is now carpeted with coffee beans. And women caused this.
Idle bushes that once provide adequate cover for withdrawing Moro fighters in an interior village in Sulu were cleared by women. Today the swathe of land is now a coffee plantation.
Princess Kumalah Sug-Elardo, chairman of the People’s Alliance for Progress Multi-Purpose Cooperative (PAP-MPC), said their husbands, many of them Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) armed followers,
have replaced their guns with plow shears to turn their lands into productive farms.
“We asked for some money to help us put fences around our farms to keep away animals, and to prevent guerrillas from just crisscrossing our lands during their battles,” Elardo said.
Younger, fiercer
A big part of the peace prevailing now in Satan Kandayok, Panamao, Sulu, emerged from the agreement signed by MNLF leaders with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines in September 1996.
Armed conflict, however, continued to threaten the island with the emergence of the younge—and, some say, fiercer—fighters of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), whose terror tactics have kept off aid and development away from this rich southwestern island province.
Elardo said the women left behind in the homes turned to productive activities when they formed the cooperative in March 2010, which now grew into 2,221 members, including former Moro fighters.
The conflict nothwithstanding, they were able to persuade government and international donors to come to their succor, in providing the good planting materials and postharvest facilities, such as roasting machines and grinders.
Without proof
THE cooperative was born out of the “need for economic and commercial development to provide business, livelihood and jobs to the local communities,” she said.
Elarde added the “large segment of the population currently unemployed and underemployed or
engaged in combat preparations.”
Sulu has consistently figured in the lower rung of the country’s poorest provinces. The province would occasionally improve one rung higher in a government list of poverty graduates only to revert back to its infamous title of being the poorest.
Elardo said, however, their cooperative would like to prove that “most of Sulu’s population can be induced to agricultural work if only the proper conditions are installed.”
The cooperative and our partner-institutions persisted, she explained. We saw that when we stimulated and conditioned the area “there is hope to resolve insurgency and bring Sulu into the economic mainstream,” she added. Her argument was not without proof.
Income
DOCUMENTS from PAP-MPC revealed that the cooperative that started with zero income for families in 2008.
A record of its annual income generation revealed that agricultural activities soon paid off
with P15,000 for each family beginning 2009 and tripling the following year. By 2011, income for each member-family hit P70,000, PAP-MPC records said.
By 2012, a member-family of the cooperative soon earned P88,000, jumping to P120,000 the next year, going up higher to P142,000 two years ago and breaching the P150,000 mark last year.
In her presentation during the Ninth National Coffee Summit here, Elardo said the improved peace-and-order situation in the area could be attributed to the increased farm activity owing to increased income also for the member-families.
“Former MNLF members sold their guns and invested in coffee,” she said.
As a consequence, “coffee farmers are now sending their children to college,” Elarde said. By 2011, four already graduated from college, 47 from high school and 89 from the elementary, she added.
Two years later, six more graduated from college, 52 from high school and 112 from elementary. The numbers just kept on churning on the following years, with eight more college graduates, 94 high-school graduates and 178 elementary graduates by 2014.
Last year 10 graduated from college, 129 from high school and 250 from the elementary.
Pick red
ELARDO said it would take a lot to further grow the local coffee industry. She said farmers could be further helped by developing agri-enterprise and improving their productivity. Elardo added consolidating value chain, applying new technology, improving processing and putting up processing plants with complete equipment in the area could also help.
So far, she reported the cooperative’s strict obedience to the “Pick Red” policy—harvesting of only choice red beans—“raised the bar of quality of Sulu’s organic coffee.”
As the cooperative also increased the yield per hectare, from 700 grams in 2011 to 1,700 grams of choiced red beans last year, it was also encouraged to plant more trees, from 35,500 to 250,000 on the same period.
“We have also exported our coffee,” she beamed.
She flashed snapshots of their processing area, showing a small, thatched-roof hut back then, to what looked like a two-classroom sized schoolbuilding, with rows and rows of coffee beans laid out neatly along the cement ground at the front yard.
Inside, a photograph showed a wooden coffee processor with household members doing
manual grinding of the beans. Another recent photograph juxtaposed the metal roasting machine.
Secret
THE local government has been persuaded also to turn the once muddy trail going to the interior coffee farms of Barangay Satan Kandayok into a concrete cemented road.
“See what coffee can do to our place, which was once an abandoned village that no one wanted to be there,” she said.
The economic blessing for the members of the cooperative was “contaminating,” she said. PAP-MPC recently expanded its network to 11 other cooperatives in the same town of Panamao, mostly formed by farmers, fishermen and women.
To date, these organizations were being assisted by the Philippine Coffee Board, the departments of Agriculture, Agrarian Reform and Trade and Industry, the Office of the Regional Governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, the Philippine Marines, the Anak Partylist and the provincial government.
It would not be difficult to cultivate coffee or any crops in Sulu as she argued that the province has good climatic conditions, fertile soils suitable for cassava and coffee, available large tracts of land for farming and available human resource at lower labor cost.
“Coffee is our business,” she said, adding that is the only secret to the success of the community against the battle against poverty.
Image credits: Nonie Reyes