Aquino urged to push for passage of coco levy bill

LUCENA CITY – To break the legal impasse that has been preventing the poor coconut farmers from benefiting from the billions of pesos of coconut levy funds, a peasant group leader on Monday urged President Aquino to immediately push for passage of the proposed Coconut Levy Funds Administration and Management Act (HB 3443) now pending in Congress.
Willy Marbella, deputy secretary general of the militant Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), said in a statement that if the President was serious in returning the coco levy funds to its real owners, all he has to do was to command Congress to enact the small coconut farmers’ trust fund bill.

HB 3443, which sought to declare the coco levy funds as “public funds,” was filed in October 2010 by Anakpawis partylist Representative Rafael Mariano.

Marbella, a coconut farmer from Bicol who still holds his parents’ stock certificates in oil mills established through the coco levy funds, said setting up the trust fund for the small coconut farmers would be the best option to free the funds from the control of the President’s uncle, business tycoon Eduardo “Danding” Conjuangco, the chairman of the food giant San Miguel Corp. (SMC) where an estimated P85 billion in coco levy fund is locked in shares of stocks.

The Supreme Court in January ruled that a 24-percent bloc of SMC shares acquired with funds from coco levy imposed during the Martial Law years and sequestered in 1986 after President Ferdinand Marcos was ousted from power belonged to the government and should now be used to ease the lives of 3.5 million coconut farmers and their families comprising a quarter of the country’s population regarded as the “poorest of the poor.”

On Sunday, two key officials of the Aquino administration – Budget Secretary Florencio Abad and Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) Administrator Euclides Forbes – said Malacañang could not act on demands by militant farmer groups that President Aquino issue an executive order directing the Presidential Commission on Good Government (PCGG) to free up interests and dividends from the SMC shares.
Abad said the 700 million SMC shares, along with interest and dividends which were officially valued at P84.3 billion in January, could not be tapped to help the ailing coconut industry because the money was still tied up in court suits.

Forbes added the President Aquino has no control over the fund because it is held in escrow upon orders of the Supreme Court.

The funds are deposited in state-owned United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB).