Fortune (Corp.) smiles on tobacco farmers

Barring last-minute hitches, the first privately built irrigation mini-dam in Ilocandia spews by July rains. Though modest by donor Fortune Tobacco Corp.’s multibillion-peso operations, it will raise incomes of 300 rice and tobacco farmers in sleepy Balaoan, La Union. And on its wake will spring at least eight more such water-impounding works in the region’s four other provinces.

Site of two reservoirs are sitios Bulbulala and Patpata Este in Balaoan’s barangay Patpata. Plunking in P2.3 million after a year of studies, Fortune Corp. in Feb. started widening a dilapidated irrigation canal and dredging an over-silted creek. Ditches have since been riprapped, basins concreted, and steel gates installed. Next week the dikes will be planted with vetiver, a grass that grows only a foot tall but roots ten feet deep to halt soil erosion. On paddies around the dams, farmers will plant rice by late June, the start of the wet season. Excess rainfall from hills to the canal and creeks will be stored to prevent usual flooding, then released during the dry months.

On Wednesday Fortune project chief Richard Yao inspected the jobs: one that will hold 5,000 cubic meters of water, the other 11,000. Engineers and farmers gathered round him to report on work progress and planting schedules. Excitement was painted on their faces, although Yao sought to downscale their expectations. "It will benefit about 60 hectares," he said, although the locals anticipate as much as 180 to 200. Incomes will surely rise from better harvests of rice during the rain months and tobacco during the dry season, and from less flood and salinity damage. But Yao stressed instead the site’s "experimental" stage. Overhearing him, former agriculture minister Salvador Escudero hummed the ’60s ditty, "Little Things Mean a Lot." Fortune boss Lucio Tan’s personal overseer of the irrigation program, Escudero has had rich experience building water impounders as foil against perennial El Niño dry spells. He knows that community-size reservoirs not only save crops but, upon turnover to barangay officials for management, also become extra earners as fishponds and picnic grounds. "Happier, fuller lives grow out of such projects," he said.

Fortune decided to bankroll irrigation in the region after the rice crop failure of 2002-2003. That season’s El Niño had Ilocos farmers desperately pumping more spring water than usual. The ground water level sank, and seawater seeped in. Salinity further ruined the following tobacco cropping, sending many farmers and leaf dealers to the poorhouse. Ilocos is tobacco land, from which Fortune buys 60 percent of its Virginia and burley leaf requirement (the rest is imported from China). Chairman Tan decided to help his sources by irrigating their land at no cost to them.

Yao chose Balaoan, a third-class municipality of 35,000, because it happens to produce the region’s best Virginia tobacco. Topography, soil and climate combine to make it so. But Balaoan farmers depend heavily on nature in the absence of man-made irrigation. Townsfolk are used to being poor. Old-timers jest that they got the town’s name during the Revolution against Spain, when the insurrectos’ bullets (bala) ran out (awan, "none" in Ilocano). Balaoan Mayor Joaquin Ostrea Jr. believes the irrigation of Patpata will increase the tobacco yield by 100 to 200 kilos from the present 1,600 per hectare. Farmers are planning too to intercrop corn, peanuts and other cash plants, as Fortune smiles on them.

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"Only trial veterans, as you stated, would sense something amiss in the Sandiganbayan’s belittling of Clarita Garcia’s affidavit on her husband’s enrichment." Thus reacted a jurist to my piece on why Gen. Carlos Garcia’s wife and sons were not dealt arrest warrants (Gotcha, 1 June 2005). "Though against her interest, she admitted to being in on it," he clarified, requesting anonymity pending retirement. "One distinction of plunder is ‘the offender is a public official acting by himself or in connivance with family members, business associates, subordinates or other persons.’ Minus her evidentiary affidavit, the case weakens not only against Mrs. Garcia but the general as well. Just wait. The court wants more probable cause versus the sons, yet over the years they acted as fronts, which is already proof of connivance."

Ombudsman Chief Special Prosecutor Dennis Villa-Ignacio, a trial veteran, shares the view perhaps. "We’re disappointed," he said of the anti-graft court’s arrest order for the general alone. "It was Clarita who admitted that (they) had received money."

Garcia’s lawyers, trial veterans as well, must have seen it as a victory. Throughout Tuesday they were busy with nothing but egging the court to let Garcia stay in special quarters at Camp Aguinaldo instead of a common jail. The Ombudsman’s plunder suit against Garcia’s co-accused was out of the way. Their concern, they said, were threats to his life.

Rep. Roilo Golez, a military graft-buster though no lawyer, praised the Ombudsman’s work for Garcia’s arrest. Still he expressed dismay that only Garcia in the Armed Forces brass is implicated. And that’s the very point of the warrant issue. Had the court considered Mrs. Garcia’s affidavit on bribery and concealment, and thus ordered her detention along with the sons, the case could take a giant step. Faced with the prospect of all going to prison, they might rattle on confederates. That could imperil Garcia’s life and necessitate safekeeping inside camp, but it would also make the case.

Everything now rests on how the three justices of the court’s second division treat the evidence. The reacting jurist suggested the Ombudsman elevate the matter to the Supreme Court. More so since, he recalled, one of trio had once junked a graft case against an AFP general, since revived on the Ombudsman’s appeal to the Tribunal. Another similarly had shelved a multiple murder case against police generals, also since remanded by the Tribunal to the lower court. Hmm....

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