Enrile-owned agri estate converted to community farms

COTABATO CITY, Philippines - The 1,127-hectare agricultural estate in Lamitan City of former Senator Juan Ponce Enrile is now a booming communal enterprise agrarian reform beneficiaries are so proud about.

The land was subdivided and awarded to 375 Muslim and Christian farm workers in 1994 through the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program.

The Enrile-owned Cocoland Development Corporation, covering arable lands in Limook area in Lamitan City, is now a cooperative run by farmers propagating coffee, orchard, rubber and bananas.

Some members of the cooperative are also producing rice from small patches of rain-fed fields inside the communal plantation.

Enrile acquired ownership of the plantation when he was defense secretary during the time of President Ferdinand Marcos.

Edilberto Martinez, manager of the Lamitan Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Cooperative (Larbeco), said Saturday the productivity of farmers in the plantation have been improving since 2012 as a result of the continuing socio-economic and infrastructure support from the Lamitan City local government unit (LGU) and the agrarian reform and public works department of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM).

“We can now transport our farm products to the markets on time because the roads connecting the center of our farming operations to trading sites have all been concreted and more roads are being concreted in adjacent barangays where we do trading activities,” he said.

He said they are also optimistic of an upswing trend soon in their communal trading activities outside of the island province of Basilan with the recent completion by the ARMM regional government of a P150 million “roll on, roll off” seaport in Lamitan City’s nearby Barangay Kulaybato.

Lamitan City, which has 45 barangays, is the capital of Basilan, a component province of ARMM. The ARMM also covers Maguindanao and Lanao del Sur, both in mainland Mindanao, and the island provinces of Sulu and Tawi-Tawi.

Martinez said the tranquility in the surroundings of their cooperative farms is also one factor for their good harvests in the past four years.

“Our LGU and the ARMM government are not just helping us produce more, but are also both trying to connect us to the markets outside of Lamitan City,” he said.

Two senior members of Larbeco’s board of directors, Ibrahim Uto and Allan Pascua, separately told The STAR on Saturday that Muslim and Christian members of the cooperative are tolerant of one another.

“We are separated only by non-irritant, acceptable religious differences and are bound cohesively by commonalities in our faiths,” Uto said.

Pascual said the calmness in the local communities is one reason why technicians from the ARMM’s agriculture and agrarian reform departments are not scared of visiting the Larbeco farmlands on periodic basis to extend technical assistance to farmers.

“We are frequently visited by people from the agriculture and agrarian reform departments of the ARMM government to check on our needs. They can come to Barangay Limook anytime because there is peace in the area,” Pascual said.

The mayor of Lamitan City, Rose Furigay, said the Larbeco is now a “model cooperative,” whose members are struggling to show to other local communal farming blocs that rising from poverty and the effects of armed conflicts can easily be achieved with right support from government agencies and other benefactors.

Records obtained from the office of Chief Inspector Allan Benasing, head of the Lamitan City police force, indicated that there has never been any heinous crime recorded in the Larbeco farmlands in the pastfive years.

“There were only some minor incidents there like quarrels among farmers intoxicated with liquor who reconciled immediately the next day. Just petty issues,” Benasing said.

Martinez said it was the massive infrastructure investments in Lamitan City by the executive department of ARMM in the past four years that helped boost their production.

Furigay said the ARMM government had spent more than P1 billion for farm-to-market roads, bridges, health facilities and schools in Lamitan City during the period.

The projects were implemented as joint programs of the Lamitan City LGU, the office of ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman and his subordinate-engineers, Don Loong, chief of the regional public works department, and Soler Undug of the Basilan District Engineering Office.

Uto said children of Larbeco member-farmers now have easy access to schools in nearby barangays as a result of the concreting of the roads crisscrossing their villages.

Benasing said there are positive indications that the farming communities under Larbeco are now “drug free” too.

“When people are busy with their farm works and are productive, they would not do anything bad that can upset their peaceful lives and derail their productivity,” Benasing said.

Martinez said they also feel so “protected” by the Department of Agrarian Reform-ARMM and the Lamitan City LGU.

“That feeling of protection is something money cannot buy. With that we shall improve our cooperative into something like the `better farming cooperative’ in Basilan,” Martinez said.