No monkey business in coconut farming

MANILA, Philippines — Philippine coconut industry stakeholder, led by the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA), say there is no monkey business in the local coco farming practice.

“Philippine Coconut farmers do not use monkeys in harvesting coconuts for local use, exports or even tourism purposes,” said (Ret. Maj. Gen.) Rhoderick Parayno of the PCA’s Office of the Administrator. Coconut trees dot an estimated 36 hectares of land in the Philippines, 3.5 million Filipinos are engaged in coconut farming .

“Not on our turf,” was the collective reaction of various Philippine coconut groups, after a video went viral showing monkeys harvesting coconuts elicited negative reaction from consumers, animal rights activists and other cause oriented groups abroad.

The use of monkey labor in harvesting coconuts in the Philippines was never a practice in its long history of coconut farming,” leading coco industry advocacy group United Coconut Association of the Philippines (UCAP) said. “Production of 15 billion nuts annually are manually harvested by coconut farmers and farm workers ,” UCAP further clarified in a statement.

The animal rights group People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) showed pigtailed macaques in Thailand working like “coconut-picking machines.” After seeing the video. the UK Prime Minister’s fiancee Carrie Symonds, a conservationist, recently called on all supermarkets to boycott the products. Experts. say that a tr ined monkey can collect up to 1000 nuts per day, while an experienced human coconut icker can only get up to 80 on a good-day.

The local arm of the (PETA), the international animal rights group which documented the now viral video, also echoed their support for the Philippine coconuts farmers and industry.

In a statement, PETA said “Other coconut-growing regions – including the Philipines, India, Brazil, Colombia and Hawaii – harvest coconuts for export using humane methods such as tractor-mounted hydraulic elevators, willing human tree-climbers, rope or platform systems, or ladders. Thailand can easily implement these humane methods, too.” The group also made it clear that “PETA does not want coconut milk or oil to be banned. We only want monkeys to be removed from the coconut-picking process.”

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources, through the office of secretary Roy Cimatu, also assured consumers, animal rights and cause-oriented groups that “the Philippines has high respect for animal rights, hence, (monkey farming) is a practice that is not done, encouraged nor tolerated in our country,’”

While the piece about the money video shot in Thailand created uproar and even calls for international boycott on coconuts sourced from similar animal labor farms, UCAP assures consumers that “the Philippines proudly offers itself as an alternative, ethnically-sourced supplier of coconut products of the highest standards.”

Yearly export earnings of Philippine-harvest coconuts reach up to $2 billion, making the country the number one source of coconuts worldwide.