It’s not just counting the eggs laid by golden goose
By Maurice Malanes
Inquirer Northern Luzon
Posted date: May 29, 2010
LA TRINIDAD, Benguet – Cooperative banking is not just about people organizing themselves and pooling their resources together so they have some money to borrow when the need arises.
“Cooperative banking must also be relevant and responsive to the current issues and concerns of our times, one of which is the challenge brought about by climate change,” says Gerry Lab-oyan, general manager of the Cooperative Bank of Benguet.
Established in 1990 with a paid-up share capital of P1.25 million, the first and only cooperative bank of Benguet now has P147,392,167 in net assets (both cash and property). The pioneers of the bank were first oriented by the Land Bank of the Philippines, which sponsored a seminar on how to develop and manage cooperatives.
For Lab-oyan, cooperative banking is not only about counting and accounting the eggs laid by the golden goose.
“It is also about ensuring that the goose remains healthy so it continues to lay those golden eggs,” he says.
The golden goose is Lab-oyan’s metaphor for the community where members of the Benguet co-op bank are engaged in various businesses.
An environmentalist and a management expert, Lab-oyan is aware of the impact of a deteriorating environment on the Cordillera, especially on Benguet, whose ecosystems are being degraded by extensive commercial vegetable farms and mining.
“So it was not surprising that when Typhoon ‘Pepeng’ hit us last year, Benguet was among those badly damaged,” he says. “The damage, of course, affected our people’s livelihood and businesses.”
The damage caused by the typhoon in October prompted many borrowers of the bank to seek a moratorium in paying their loans.
Aware of the interconnection between ecology and agriculture-based businesses and livelihood, the bank has embarked on promoting alternatives to commercial vegetable farming and mining.
One of these alternatives is agro-forestry or integrating fruit-bearing and forest trees with farming. This is no wonder why the bank has been supporting initiatives to revive the Arabica coffee industry in Benguet and other parts of the upland region.
Arabica plants only need 25 percent sunlight so they need taller and bigger trees around them. Those who wish to plant Arabica, says Lab-oyan, must also plant “shade and nurse trees” such as alnus, caliandra and pine, and fruit trees such as jackfruit, star apple and other trees.
The bank has thus helped and continues to help farmers, local governments and entrepreneurs in organizing Arabica coffee councils, says Lab-oyan.
It has also helped the initiatives of the Benguet Organic Coffee Enterprises Limited Inc., a homegrown coffee processing and trading outfit, in reviving centuries-old Arabica plants.
“In helping promote the Arabica industry, we are encouraging people to plant trees, which can also help cool our planet,” says Lab-oyan.
Another thrust of the bank is promoting and helping local folk rediscover their own culture, particularly indigenous food and cuisine.
“The food recipes of our forebears were all natural and diverse,” says Lab-oyan. “And what people consume ultimately affects our environment.”
“If we go natural, we are actually promoting organic and diversified farming, which is an alternative to chemical-dependent commercial monocrop farming,” he says.
The bank has been collaborating with the La Trinidad government in organizing what it calls “Ethnic Food Festival” as part of the town’s annual Strawberry Festival.
The bank is also promoting what Lab-oyan calls “diversified agri-enterprise” and “integrated farming.” It helps finance farmers who integrate farming with raising cattle and poultry, especially those who go organic.
“The key is diversity because this is what is good for our environment,” Lab-oyan says. “And the more we diversify in our business enterprises, the more we diversify our skills so the bigger chances of success in our endeavors.”
The bank may not immediately reap the returns of what it invested in its various initiatives. “But the returns on investments on the environment and other initiatives related to helping address climate change may come in the long term such as in the form of healthier communities,” he says.
Like any other businesses, cooperative banks must also compete with other financing institutions.
“But in our co-op bank, we are not concerned only with how to stay ahead in the competition but how to be relevant also to the community,” Lab-oyan says.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
CORDILLERA AUTONOMY : A failure of listening and imagination?
CORDILLERA AUTONOMY
CORDILLERA AUTONOMY : A failure of listening and imagination?
By Maurice Malanes
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: May 19, 2010
HARDLY ANY OF THE CANdidates in the Cordillera picked up regional autonomy as part of their platform for the May 10 elections.
This must be a fortunate coincidence, though. Otherwise, the political noise would have just drowned out a healthier debate about Cordillera autonomy, which, according to a University of the Philippines professor, needs a lot of listening and imagination.
For a debate on autonomy to prosper, the protagonists may have to sit down in the traditions of the dap-ay (the indigenous roundtable conference of the Bontok), the tongtongan (Benguet’s dap-ay counterpart), and the bodong of the Kalinga and Tinggian.
These indigenous institutions require the participants to listen to each other so they can agree on a consensus, which must ultimately serve the greater good of the community.
But the institutions and people who led in the autonomy debate had largely failed to lend their ears to each other. The result, says Dr. Athena Lydia Casambre, was a “disjuncture—the failure to meet point-to-point.”
This, says Casambre, a former UP Baguio faculty member, characterized the debate on Cordillera autonomy. “No wonder that the proposed Organic Act (draft law for autonomy) was soundly rejected in January 1990,” the first political exercise that could have helped institutionalize self-rule, she says.
Casambre, now a political science professor at UP Diliman, was at UP Baguio last month to attend a political science workshop and the launching of “Discourses on Cordillera Autonomy,” a book compiling her three essays on the upland region’s attempt at self-governance.
She cites almost the same failure of the various players to meet in 1998, when another proposed organic act was rejected.
Key players
Casambre analyzes how the autonomy issue and its key players evolved as a response to a long history of discrimination and neglect, which heightened during the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law reign.
She also notes how the shift from Marcos’ martial rule to President Corazon Aquino’s liberal-democratic politics “provided the impetus for progressive groups in Cordillera civil society, principally the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA), to push their political agenda further.”
After Marcos’ ouster in February 1986, the CPA sustained the momentum of mobilization against a series of the regime’s dam projects along the Chico River, she says.
With the “democratic space” under Aquino, it helped lobby for the inclusion in the 1987 Constitution of the provision for autonomous regions in the Cordillera and Muslim Mindanao, Casambre says.
This same democratic space and post-Edsa euphoria led to other interesting developments. Casambre cites the Aquino administration’s peace negotiations with Fr. Conrado Balweg’s Cordillera People’s Liberation Army (CPLA), which led to the sipat (peace pact) on Sept. 13, 1986, in Mount Data in Bauko, Mt. Province.
This pact eventually prompted Aquino to craft Executive Order No. 220, which established a special Cordillera Administrative Region to prepare the region for autonomy.
“The Edsa Revolt and the democratic politics immediately following upon it unquestionably hastened the coming to the fore of the issue of Cordillera autonomy,” Casambre says.
Since the constitutional provision for regional autonomy needed an enabling law, a measure was drafted and submitted to the Cordillera electorate in a plebiscite in January 1990.
Before the voting were intense debates on autonomy. Casambre identifies the main protagonists: CPA, CPLA, Bibak (Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc, Apayao and Kalinga) Professionals Association or BPA, Cordillera Broad Coalition (CBC), and the regional National Economic and Development Authority.
Casambre notes, however, that the debates did not lead to a “clear, comprehensible and acceptable proposition” for supporting an autonomous region.
She finds it ironic that the CPA, which helped lobby for the inclusion of autonomy in the Constitution, made “a 180-degree turn,” campaigning to reject the proposed organic act.
Disjointed
The CPA’s move was “not least because what they (CPA leaders) had won in the form of a constitutional provision had become perverted as soon as the government entered into a sipat with the CPLA” but because the two groups “had radically different projects in mind,” Casambre says.
“The narrative of Cordillera autonomy,” she says, “became severely disjointed at this point.”
What Casambre calls the “middle” sectors, led by the professionals, “caught in a choice between two unacceptable projects, found themselves aligning with others behind the proposal for regionalization without the urgency of autonomy as espoused by the CPA and CPLA.”
The CPA argued for autonomy on the premise of a newly formed “pan-Cordillera identity” and called it “Kaigorotan.” This was not well-received because the Cordillera natives’ self-identity was and continues to be anchored in the village, Casambre says.
Its regional autonomy project was also conceived within “the larger politics of national democracy (nat-dem),” which, she says, “spooked” the majority of the voters.
Until now, she says, despite fostering empowered people’s organizations in the region, not enough voters would support an autonomous region as defined by the CPA because of the “nat-dem specter.”
“The CPA will have to engage in ‘coalition politics’ and collaborate with other groups in articulating a vision of Cordillera autonomy that will have a foreseeable future,” Casambre says.
But she says voters were also repelled by the CPLA’s version of autonomy based on a proposed “Cordillera Autonomous Socialist State” and a “romanticized Cordillera Nation,” with the bodong as the overall guiding indigenous political institution.
The participation later of bureaucrats and lawyers did not help either in clarifying issues on the autonomy debate, she says.
“Not a tenable basis for Cordillera autonomy has been achieved because of a general failure of imagination,” she says.
Casambre suggests the need for “discipline and direction” in gathering and analyzing data or putting the pieces together “so we could see the whole picture.”
Through these, the key players and stakeholders in the autonomy discourse can finally grasp the “unfamiliar from the familiar” and so “we can move outwards,” she says.
CORDILLERA AUTONOMY : A failure of listening and imagination?
By Maurice Malanes
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: May 19, 2010
HARDLY ANY OF THE CANdidates in the Cordillera picked up regional autonomy as part of their platform for the May 10 elections.
This must be a fortunate coincidence, though. Otherwise, the political noise would have just drowned out a healthier debate about Cordillera autonomy, which, according to a University of the Philippines professor, needs a lot of listening and imagination.
For a debate on autonomy to prosper, the protagonists may have to sit down in the traditions of the dap-ay (the indigenous roundtable conference of the Bontok), the tongtongan (Benguet’s dap-ay counterpart), and the bodong of the Kalinga and Tinggian.
These indigenous institutions require the participants to listen to each other so they can agree on a consensus, which must ultimately serve the greater good of the community.
But the institutions and people who led in the autonomy debate had largely failed to lend their ears to each other. The result, says Dr. Athena Lydia Casambre, was a “disjuncture—the failure to meet point-to-point.”
This, says Casambre, a former UP Baguio faculty member, characterized the debate on Cordillera autonomy. “No wonder that the proposed Organic Act (draft law for autonomy) was soundly rejected in January 1990,” the first political exercise that could have helped institutionalize self-rule, she says.
Casambre, now a political science professor at UP Diliman, was at UP Baguio last month to attend a political science workshop and the launching of “Discourses on Cordillera Autonomy,” a book compiling her three essays on the upland region’s attempt at self-governance.
She cites almost the same failure of the various players to meet in 1998, when another proposed organic act was rejected.
Key players
Casambre analyzes how the autonomy issue and its key players evolved as a response to a long history of discrimination and neglect, which heightened during the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law reign.
She also notes how the shift from Marcos’ martial rule to President Corazon Aquino’s liberal-democratic politics “provided the impetus for progressive groups in Cordillera civil society, principally the Cordillera Peoples Alliance (CPA), to push their political agenda further.”
After Marcos’ ouster in February 1986, the CPA sustained the momentum of mobilization against a series of the regime’s dam projects along the Chico River, she says.
With the “democratic space” under Aquino, it helped lobby for the inclusion in the 1987 Constitution of the provision for autonomous regions in the Cordillera and Muslim Mindanao, Casambre says.
This same democratic space and post-Edsa euphoria led to other interesting developments. Casambre cites the Aquino administration’s peace negotiations with Fr. Conrado Balweg’s Cordillera People’s Liberation Army (CPLA), which led to the sipat (peace pact) on Sept. 13, 1986, in Mount Data in Bauko, Mt. Province.
This pact eventually prompted Aquino to craft Executive Order No. 220, which established a special Cordillera Administrative Region to prepare the region for autonomy.
“The Edsa Revolt and the democratic politics immediately following upon it unquestionably hastened the coming to the fore of the issue of Cordillera autonomy,” Casambre says.
Since the constitutional provision for regional autonomy needed an enabling law, a measure was drafted and submitted to the Cordillera electorate in a plebiscite in January 1990.
Before the voting were intense debates on autonomy. Casambre identifies the main protagonists: CPA, CPLA, Bibak (Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc, Apayao and Kalinga) Professionals Association or BPA, Cordillera Broad Coalition (CBC), and the regional National Economic and Development Authority.
Casambre notes, however, that the debates did not lead to a “clear, comprehensible and acceptable proposition” for supporting an autonomous region.
She finds it ironic that the CPA, which helped lobby for the inclusion of autonomy in the Constitution, made “a 180-degree turn,” campaigning to reject the proposed organic act.
Disjointed
The CPA’s move was “not least because what they (CPA leaders) had won in the form of a constitutional provision had become perverted as soon as the government entered into a sipat with the CPLA” but because the two groups “had radically different projects in mind,” Casambre says.
“The narrative of Cordillera autonomy,” she says, “became severely disjointed at this point.”
What Casambre calls the “middle” sectors, led by the professionals, “caught in a choice between two unacceptable projects, found themselves aligning with others behind the proposal for regionalization without the urgency of autonomy as espoused by the CPA and CPLA.”
The CPA argued for autonomy on the premise of a newly formed “pan-Cordillera identity” and called it “Kaigorotan.” This was not well-received because the Cordillera natives’ self-identity was and continues to be anchored in the village, Casambre says.
Its regional autonomy project was also conceived within “the larger politics of national democracy (nat-dem),” which, she says, “spooked” the majority of the voters.
Until now, she says, despite fostering empowered people’s organizations in the region, not enough voters would support an autonomous region as defined by the CPA because of the “nat-dem specter.”
“The CPA will have to engage in ‘coalition politics’ and collaborate with other groups in articulating a vision of Cordillera autonomy that will have a foreseeable future,” Casambre says.
But she says voters were also repelled by the CPLA’s version of autonomy based on a proposed “Cordillera Autonomous Socialist State” and a “romanticized Cordillera Nation,” with the bodong as the overall guiding indigenous political institution.
The participation later of bureaucrats and lawyers did not help either in clarifying issues on the autonomy debate, she says.
“Not a tenable basis for Cordillera autonomy has been achieved because of a general failure of imagination,” she says.
Casambre suggests the need for “discipline and direction” in gathering and analyzing data or putting the pieces together “so we could see the whole picture.”
Through these, the key players and stakeholders in the autonomy discourse can finally grasp the “unfamiliar from the familiar” and so “we can move outwards,” she says.
Elections as clan reunions
Elections as clan reunions
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: May 19, 2010
AS IN PAST POLLS, LOINA CAYAD-AN-PANTALEON HAD TO cook extra food for lunch for an expected reason during the May 10 political exercise.
Just a stone’s throw away from the two polling precincts in Barangay Poblacion in Kibungan, Benguet, her house has become the convenient second home and venue for instant reunions for family members and relatives, who have preferred to vote in their hometown than in their places of work, such as Baguio City and Metro Manila.
“We have something special for you,” Cayad-an-Pantaleon, the Sangguniang Bayan (municipal council) secretary, said as she welcomed guests. She was referring to the kini-ing (smoked meat) and other recipes that her family prepared.
The kini-ing was processed by her 89-year-old father, Celino Cayad-an, who was again excited to welcome his grandchildren, nephews and nieces.
Exhausted and hungry clan members appreciated the sumptuous lunch plus overflowing Arabica brew, which, they said, were enough to compensate for the three-to-four-hour queue they had to bear under the heat before they cast their votes on May 10.
The smoked meat was the elder Cayad-an’s endearing way of welcoming clan members, some of whom have made him proud.
One of the prominent members is Jurgenson Lagdao, a provincial prosecutor, whom the old man would always like to meet and welcome every election.
Although he and his family built their home in Baguio, Lagdao had never transferred his place of voter’s registration. Every vote he casts is his way of helping bring change in his own hometown, he says.
Political caucus
As Cayad-an reiterated the schedule of a bigger clan reunion in 2013, discussions over coffee would unavoidably shift to politics.
The instant get-together at Cayad-an-Pantaleon’s house had thus become an informal political caucus. The discussion became political also after Lagdao and Octavio Cuanso, an environment official in Benguet, took turns in suggesting ways for the country to return to a two-party system.
Other clan members agreed that a two-party system could help simplify the country’s electoral process.
“Through a strict screening process, each party can finally push for highly competent people, who can really run the country,” Lagdao said. “Maybe we can learn from other more mature democracies, including the United States.”
Cuanso also suggested mobilizing nongovernment and people’s organizations in helping facilitate discussions and forums to tackle the country’s return to a two-party system.
“If we have an efficient two-party system through which chosen leaders could really serve the country, maybe we can even do away with these party-list groups,” he said. Maurice Malanes
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: May 19, 2010
AS IN PAST POLLS, LOINA CAYAD-AN-PANTALEON HAD TO cook extra food for lunch for an expected reason during the May 10 political exercise.
Just a stone’s throw away from the two polling precincts in Barangay Poblacion in Kibungan, Benguet, her house has become the convenient second home and venue for instant reunions for family members and relatives, who have preferred to vote in their hometown than in their places of work, such as Baguio City and Metro Manila.
“We have something special for you,” Cayad-an-Pantaleon, the Sangguniang Bayan (municipal council) secretary, said as she welcomed guests. She was referring to the kini-ing (smoked meat) and other recipes that her family prepared.
The kini-ing was processed by her 89-year-old father, Celino Cayad-an, who was again excited to welcome his grandchildren, nephews and nieces.
Exhausted and hungry clan members appreciated the sumptuous lunch plus overflowing Arabica brew, which, they said, were enough to compensate for the three-to-four-hour queue they had to bear under the heat before they cast their votes on May 10.
The smoked meat was the elder Cayad-an’s endearing way of welcoming clan members, some of whom have made him proud.
One of the prominent members is Jurgenson Lagdao, a provincial prosecutor, whom the old man would always like to meet and welcome every election.
Although he and his family built their home in Baguio, Lagdao had never transferred his place of voter’s registration. Every vote he casts is his way of helping bring change in his own hometown, he says.
Political caucus
As Cayad-an reiterated the schedule of a bigger clan reunion in 2013, discussions over coffee would unavoidably shift to politics.
The instant get-together at Cayad-an-Pantaleon’s house had thus become an informal political caucus. The discussion became political also after Lagdao and Octavio Cuanso, an environment official in Benguet, took turns in suggesting ways for the country to return to a two-party system.
Other clan members agreed that a two-party system could help simplify the country’s electoral process.
“Through a strict screening process, each party can finally push for highly competent people, who can really run the country,” Lagdao said. “Maybe we can learn from other more mature democracies, including the United States.”
Cuanso also suggested mobilizing nongovernment and people’s organizations in helping facilitate discussions and forums to tackle the country’s return to a two-party system.
“If we have an efficient two-party system through which chosen leaders could really serve the country, maybe we can even do away with these party-list groups,” he said. Maurice Malanes
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Benguet town holds feast to purge election evil
Benguet town holds feast to purge election evil
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: May 15, 2010
KIBUNGAN, BENGUET—AFter enduring the hot, dry season sun during the long queue for the country’s first automated elections on May 10, upland folk here were treated on Tuesday to a community meal, consisting of carabeef and pork broth.
The treat came from the winners of the local election led by reelected Mayor Benito Siadto (Lakas-Kampi-CMD), Vice Mayor-elect Auriana Sacpa (Nacionalista Party) and the eight newly elected councilors of this upland town of 8,041 voters.
A carabao and two pigs were slaughtered for the feast. But the animals were brought only early in the afternoon so community folk, who had been waiting to partake of a lunch meal, had to wait until 6 p.m. for an early dinner.
After dinner, Kibungan election official Rey Oliva proclaimed the newly elected officials.
“As has been the tradition, this feast won’t just be a ‘blowout’ but a common meal to promote reconciliation and harmony again between and among the various candidates who might have verbally hurt or offended each other during the campaign,” said Fausto Songyoen, the town’s civil registrar.
A local elder, or manbunong, offered the sacrificial animals to the gods and spirits, invoking them to continue to bless the community and cleanse all the negative impact of verbal attacks and accusations candidates had exchanged during the political campaign.
Kibungan, a farming town of more than 15,000 residents, experienced almost similar glitches and discomforts, which other voters in various polling centers in the country experienced on Monday. The town is about 40 kilometers from Baguio City.
Election results could not be transmitted from the polling centers to the canvassing server at the town hall because many of the broadband-based transmission gadgets would not work and many voters had to endure heat, thirst and hunger as they waited for at least three hours for their turn to vote.
“This postelection feast would thus help us forget all our sacrifices and discomforts on Election Day so we could move on again as a community,” said Songyoen. Maurice Malanes, Inquirer Northern Luzon
Philippine Daily Inquirer
Posted date: May 15, 2010
KIBUNGAN, BENGUET—AFter enduring the hot, dry season sun during the long queue for the country’s first automated elections on May 10, upland folk here were treated on Tuesday to a community meal, consisting of carabeef and pork broth.
The treat came from the winners of the local election led by reelected Mayor Benito Siadto (Lakas-Kampi-CMD), Vice Mayor-elect Auriana Sacpa (Nacionalista Party) and the eight newly elected councilors of this upland town of 8,041 voters.
A carabao and two pigs were slaughtered for the feast. But the animals were brought only early in the afternoon so community folk, who had been waiting to partake of a lunch meal, had to wait until 6 p.m. for an early dinner.
After dinner, Kibungan election official Rey Oliva proclaimed the newly elected officials.
“As has been the tradition, this feast won’t just be a ‘blowout’ but a common meal to promote reconciliation and harmony again between and among the various candidates who might have verbally hurt or offended each other during the campaign,” said Fausto Songyoen, the town’s civil registrar.
A local elder, or manbunong, offered the sacrificial animals to the gods and spirits, invoking them to continue to bless the community and cleanse all the negative impact of verbal attacks and accusations candidates had exchanged during the political campaign.
Kibungan, a farming town of more than 15,000 residents, experienced almost similar glitches and discomforts, which other voters in various polling centers in the country experienced on Monday. The town is about 40 kilometers from Baguio City.
Election results could not be transmitted from the polling centers to the canvassing server at the town hall because many of the broadband-based transmission gadgets would not work and many voters had to endure heat, thirst and hunger as they waited for at least three hours for their turn to vote.
“This postelection feast would thus help us forget all our sacrifices and discomforts on Election Day so we could move on again as a community,” said Songyoen. Maurice Malanes, Inquirer Northern Luzon
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