ON OCTOBER 3 to 5 this year, the 14th National Cooperative Summit will reel-off in Davao City carrying the theme, “Overcoing Challenges, Succeeding Together Under One Apex.”
As usual, thousands of cooperative leaders all over the country will attend representing some 27,000 cooperatives with some 14 million members.
Indeed, the cooperative movement in the Philippines has scaled the heights to trail-blaze the imperative need for paradigm shifts in a country where only a few oligarchs are in control of the economy.
Democratize wealth and power. That is the call of those who are in the margins of development. But such call is easier said than done in a highly skewed societal order.
While our forefathers had waged a revolution to topple down a colonial regime to fight for freedom, cooperativism has loomed in this country to free the people from the quagmire of poverty, hunger, disempowerment and social exclusion.
In this light, cooperatives are working not so much for the freedom OF but for the freedom FROM hunger and poverty in a land that is oozing with ecological wealth.
Unfettering the people from hunger and poverty calls for a strong advocacy as it is all about shifts in paradigms and in socio-economic-political re-structuring. That is what cooperativism is all about as no less than the 1987 Constitution mandated the creation of the cooperatives “to promote social justice, equity and economic development.”
Those in the margins should now be drawn into the mainstream of development, the powerless should be empowered and the voiceless should now be heard. Their respective cooperatives should now articulate important issues besetting them and only by conducting Cooperative Summits that these issues be properly advocated.
The question is that, after all these years of conducting National Summits, what were the issues that have been articulated and resolved? It is now the right time to advocate for relevant pressing issues in the spirit of Biyaya ng Pagbabago. Let me elaborate.
In the life of the peasantry, any long term development can be won or lost through agriculture, yet, the 70 percent of our people who are in the rural areas and are involved in agriculturally-related activities are still as poor as ever as everyone is profiting from farming – the fertilizer dealers, the compradors, the landlords, the agri-business corporations and the usurers – but not those who are working under the rains or under the excruciating heat of the sun – the farmers.
It has been a long drawn struggle to have a paradigm shift from conventional to sustainable agriculture through cooperativism but until now the relevant issues for such paradigm shift remain unheard. We have been advocating to free the land from the stranglehold of big business because in Mindanao, the choicest of lands are under their control but to no avail. We cannot even make this agricultural country be self-sufficient in its basic staple food, rice, which remains under the control of the rice cartel.
In the case of the so-called electric cooperatives, they are providing light to their member-consumer-owners, yet, they are putting them in the dark as regards the genuine ownership of these ECs. The unbundling of rate has shown that their MCOs have paid all these years two items that will make them capital shareholders such as amortization of loans and reinvestment.
For these two items alone, each MCO has already paid-up tens of thousands as their capital shares yet these have not been recognized. There were attempts in the past Summits to include advocating of this very critical issue which is manifesting the highest degree of social injustice but never has such issue been tackled that puts in clear categorical term the relevance of Coop Summits.
As regards the massive exploitation of our natural resources, we have already lost the 17 million hectares of dipterocarp forest and all the mega-diversity, 10 of the 13 major bays in the country are now biologically dead, 25 major rivers are now without water or highly polluted – all to the detriment of our ecological people. The cooperatives of the Indigenous People, the farmers and the fisherfolk – have been advocating for environmental protection during the previous summits.
Today, our Lumads are organized into cooperatives to nurture and preserve these resources because we have allowed the power hunger few to use their power to perpetuate their greed at the expense of the welfare of the people and the future of the coming generations.
For those who just see cooperatives as business organizations and not for social transformation, it is time to broaden your myopic perspective. Unless you transform a highly skewed societal order, unless you effect paradigm shifts, unless you empower the people to craft their own destiny, poverty, social injustice, inequities and hunger will always prevail in a society where unbridled consumerism and materialism rules.
To be a cooperative means social transformation and no transformation can be had unless the cooperatives do advocacy, be issue or policy-wise. A cooperative without advocacy is like a night without stars. So during the coming 14th National Cooperative Summit, let it be different from the previous ones. This time, the Summit must prove equal to the term, Transformative Cooperatives for people, planet, prosperity and peace!