Negros tillers want out of deal with Danding

Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco Jr. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

FARMERS from Negros Occidental haciendas have filed a petition with the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) asking the agency to cancel or at least allow them to withdraw from a 10-year-old joint venture agreement with San Miguel Corp. chair Eduardo “Danding” Cojuangco Jr.

Last week, around 45 farmers under the ECJ Cloa Holders Association trooped to the DAR central office in Quezon City to file a petition for withdrawal from the Cojuangco-controlled Southern Negros Joint Venture Corp. (SNJVC), which covers nine haciendas in Negros Occidental.

The farmers were among 1,200 who were granted certificates of land ownership award (CLOA) under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP). The farmers’ CLOAs cover more than 3,000 hectares of land in Negros Occidental and were registered from 2002 to 2004. The farmers then joined the SNJVC as stockholders in 2005.

According to Securities and Exchange Commission records as of 2015 and obtained by national peasant group Task Force Mapalad—which is assisting the Negros farmers—more than 70 percent of the stockholdership of SNJVC is controlled by Cojuangco and his corporations and associates.

The farm workers control only 30 percent of SNJVC stocks, and are also regular workers for SNJVC.

According to the farmers, throughout the 10 years of the SNJVC, they remained mired in poverty. The farm workers-stockholders receive a total of only P10,000 per year in profit-sharing dividends from the SNJVC, or around P833 a month each.

The farmers said the owners of SNJVC had promised to “make them millionaires in 10 years” if they joined the venture. But many of their co-land owners had since died and were still “buried under debt,” said one of the farmers, Joel Noche from Hacienda Candelaria in San Enrique, Negros Occidental, during a press conference at the DAR on Friday.

The farmers said the SNJVC management kept telling them the company was going broke, although no financial statements were ever furnished them to prove such claims, he added.

Despite their meager dividend earnings, the officers of the company and other executives of Cojuangco appeared to be getting rich, said the farmers. They also said they had no security of tenure in their jobs, and that some had even been removed from their jobs, even if they were the CLOA holders.

The farmers said they had long wanted to withdraw from the SNJVC scheme but were afraid of the Cojuangcos.