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If this story was just
fiction, I couldn't have made it up; and I haven't gone into all
the lurid details. It's much worse than this pedestrian account. After I
first published this page on the web, I was contacted by a UN
representative who had been in the Philippines as this scandal was just
getting really under way.
He gave a near-eyewitness
account of the assassination attempt on Marcos's Vice President Pelaez (a
good man who was concerned about the power and money being amassed by a
very few of Marcos' cronies, and was about to expose the whole scam)
including the telling detail of how the 'lone' gunman pumped 3 shots into
one side of the back of Pelaez' car, two into the front, and walked around
to give three more into the back from the other side, just to make sure.
Pelaez didn't say much more about the Coconut Bank Scam
Let the US Government (ex-colonisers of the Philippines
and not without influence still) tell the story in their own
words:
"
The Philippines is the world's second largest producer of coconut
products, after Indonesia.  In 1989 it produced 11.8 million tons. In 1989, coconut
products, coconut oil, copra (dried coconut), and desiccated coconut
accounted for approximately 6.7 percent of Philippine exports. About 25
percent of cultivated land was planted in coconut trees, and it is
estimated that between 25 percent and 33 percent of the population was at
least partly dependent on coconuts for their livelihood. Historically, the
Southern Tagalog and Bicol regions of Luzon and the Eastern Visayas were
the centers of coconut production. In the 1980s, Western Mindanao and
Southern Mindanao also became important coconut-growing
regions
(See: Coconut
Carries the Can for what this policy did to the forests of these
regions - RP).
In the early 1990s, the
average coconut farm was a medium-sized unit of less than four hectares.
"
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(For
copra, an average of 6,000 nuts are required for 1 ton; 1,000 nuts
yield 500 lbs. of copra, which yields 250 lbs. of oil. Average yield
of copra per ha is 3-4 tons). Purdue
University
Of course, not all, or even very
many, Philippine coconut growers can achieve this.
Assuming the very best, a 4
hectare plot will produce 16 US tons or 14,550kg – at P25, the
current price - US$0.50 per kg, this would give an average landowner
a gross profit (before fertiliser, labour,
etc, costs) of just $7,225 per annum.
Local land prices now
– for premium beachfront land - are P500 per M2 – Pesos
half-a-million per hectare or about US$40,000 per average coconut
farm. Is a gross return (before any costs at all) on
agricultural land of just 18% worthwhile? Not many local landowners
think so. They’d prefer to have usable cash in hand, and spend it
before tomorrow brings them some awful disaster, of which there are
many in the Philippine, and most of which may wipe out their
coconuts
anyway. |
Continuing the US
Government's spiel:
"Owners,
often absentee, customarily employed local peasants to collect coconuts
rather than engage in tenancy relationships. The villagers were paid on a
piece-rate basis. Those employed in the coconut industry tended to be less
educated and older than the average person in the rural labor force and
earned lower-than-average incomes
In less mincing words,
‘coco-pickers’ in the Philippines are probably worth even less than
cotton-pickin' nigras in the US.
Land devoted to
cultivation of coconuts increased by about 6 percent per year during the
1960s and 1970s..
This doesn’t sound very
much, but it means an increase of 220% over 20 years – no wonder
Philippine forests were cleared
...
a response to devaluations of the peso in 1962 and 1970 and increasing
world demand. Responding to the world market, the Philippine government
encouraged processing of copra domestically and provided investment
incentives to increase the construction of coconut oil mills. The number
of mills rose from twenty-eight in 1968 to sixty-two in 1979, creating
substantial excess capacity. The situation was aggravated by declining
yields because of the aging of coconut trees in some
regions.
In
1973 the martial law regime president merged all coconut-related,
government operations within a single agency, the Philippine Coconut
Authority (PCA). The PCA was empowered to collect a levy of P0.55 per 100
kilograms on the sale of copra to be used to stabilize the domestic price
of coconut-based consumer goods, particularly cooking oil. In 1974 the
government created the Coconut Industry Development Fund (CIDF) to finance
the development of a hybrid coconut tree. To finance the project, the levy
was increased to P20.
 Also in
1974, coconut planters, led by the Coconut Producers Federation (Cocofed),
an organization of large planters, took control of the PCA governing
board. In 1975 the PCA acquired a bank, renamed the United Coconut
Planters Bank, to ‘service the needs of coconut farmers’, and the PCA
director, Eduardo Cojuangco, a business associate (aka crony) of Marcos, became
its president.
Levies
collected by the PCA were placed in the bank, initially interest-free
(the bank paid nothing to use the coconut farmers’
fund). In 1978 the United Coconut
Planters Bank was given legal authority to purchase coconut mills,
ostensibly as a measure to cope with excess capacity in the industry. At
the same time, mills not owned by coconut farmers--that is, Cocofed
members or entities it controlled through the PCA--were denied subsidy
payments to compensate for the price controls on coconut-based consumer
products.
By early
1980, it was reported in the Philippine press that the United Coconut Oil
Mills, a PCA-owned firm, and its president, Cojuangco, controlled 80
percent of the Philippine oil-milling capacity. Minister of Defense Juan
Ponce Enrile also exercised strong influence over the industry as chairman
of both the United Coconut Planters Bank and United Coconut Oil Mills and
honorary chairman of Cocofed.
An industry
composed of some 0.5 million farmers and 14,000 traders was, by the early
1980s, highly monopolized.
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MANUEL F. MARTINEZ
wrote in 2004:
You cannot
imagine the amount of money involved in the coco levy collection. It
was not only gargantuan. It was incalculable, bigger than the fabled
treasures of Solomon.
It was so big
that the coco levy gang, after monopolizing the coconut industry in
the Philippines from copra trading to oil milling to the export of
coconut oil, schemed to establish two huge coconut oil entities in
Europe and to control the vast organic oil market in the United
States in competition with soya or bean
oil.
The Americans
were stunned. They slapped the Filipinos with anti-trust laws. The
Filipinos, to settle the case, contritely paid some $2 millions as
some kind of a fine, and left the American market uncontrolled by
them.
I do not know
what happened to the contemplated two giant coco oil firms in
Europe, designed also to put a stranglehold on the rich European
market. Europeans, by the way, are coco
oil-hungry.
The fleecing
of all Filipino coconut farmers, both rich and poor, was so
malignant and so devastating that the former Vice President Emmanuel
Pelaez, who belonged to the Marcos administration, rose in the
Batasan to condemn the coco levy shebang, which was the biggest
single fund in our entire history.
One midnight,
while riding in his car on his way home to New Manila in Quezon
City, a group of armed men peppered his car with bullets, killing
instantly Pelaez' driver of 30 years.
Pelaez himself
sustained many wounds and the ambushers checked if he was dead. He
played dead and they left.
The former
vice president then inched to the gate of a house, where the
residents, in spite of their fear in those fear-laden times, took
pity on his blood-soaked body and took him to the hospital
half-dead.
He survived.
Later, the always joking Filipinos passed the story around that when
police went to the ambush scene, late as usual, to investigate, what
they found were not empty Armalite bullets shells but broken pieces
of coconut shell.
From then on
nary a pip was heard against the coco levy vacuum cleaner until
after the EDSA People Power Revolution.
MANUEL
F. MARTINEZ - People's Journal - Thursday,
September 02, 2004 |
Continuing the US
Government's spiel:
"In principle, the coconut
farmers were to be the beneficiaries of the levy, which between March 1977 and September 1981 stabilized at P76 per
100 kilograms (1380% increase in just 8 years – this
was big-time extortion - RP). Contingent
benefits included life insurance, educational scholarships, and a cooking
oil subsidy, but few actually benefited. The aim of the replanting
program, controlled by Cojuangco
... (His own island estate, Bugsok, south-east of
Palawan, was the only one to be substantially planted -RP) ... was to replace aging coconut trees with a hybrid
of a Malaysian dwarf and West African tall varieties. The new palms were
to produce five times the weight per year of existing trees. The
target of replanting 60,000 trees a year
was not met. In 1983, 25 to 30 percent
of coconut trees were estimated to be at least sixty years old; by 1988,
the proportion had increased to between 35 and 40
percent.
 When coconut prices began to fall in the early 1980s,
pressure mounted to alter the structure of the industry. In 1985 the
Philippine government agreed to dismantle the United Coconut Oil
Mills as part of an agreement with the IMF to bail out the
Philippine economy. Later a 1988 United States law requiring foods
using tropical oils to be labeled indicating the saturated fat content
"(Note - Coconut oil certainly contains saturated
fats, but they are not the ones implicated in cardiac
problems) had a negative impact on an
already ailing industry and gave rise to protests from coconut growers
that similar requirements were not levied on oils produced in temperate
climates. "
Country
Studies – US Government - U.S. Library of
Congress
– Emphases and insertions
by me - RP
As government
propaganda, this doesn’t tell the full story, of
course.
Ferdinand Marcos, for decades a friend of the USA,
valiant fighter against Commernism, and host to the 'major US air and
naval bases in the Far East’ is glossed over as ‘the martial law regime
president’.
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The ‘saturated fats’ scare
was deliberately manufactured by proponents of peanut, corn and
soy bean oil to do down both animal fats and foreign vegetable oils,
in which it greatly succeeded. Animal fats - milk and butter - were
in surplus in Europe – vegetable oils everywhere but the US. You
only have to look up the phrase ‘saturated fats’ on the
Internet now to see that the claptrap still reigns. If US
industrialists and their politician cronies had managed to find a
way of mass-producing and promoting snake oil, believe me, they
would have done it. |
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MANUEL F. MARTINEZ
wrote in 2004:
[Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo, the current President of the Philippines] wants
the P150-billion fund, which I now estimate to be at least P250
billion, (about US$ 5
billion) returned to the coco farmers
— or if not returned, at least spent for their direct and
indubitable benefit.
[all] estimates about the coco
levy collection are way below what was actually
collected.
This is because the records of the coco levy
collection are — or were — incomplete. And nobody knows where they
are now.
Most records were at the Philippine Coconut
Authority, but the Commission on Audit report said that such records
as were found did not always follow ‘established accounting
practices and procedures’.
The Commission on Audit, at
the instigation of Cory's chairman of the PCA, Oscar Santos, sent
the biggest team of auditors and lawyers in Philippine history to
make the audit — to no avail.
With her official support
(Ha ! Ha ! ha !- RP) for
the poor coconut farmers, President GMA (Glorietta, the family inheritor of her father Ramon
Macapagal's Philippine Presidency)
is, therefore, on the same side as the courts which have declared
the coco levy collection as public money.
MANUEL
F. MARTINEZ - People's Journal - Thursday,
September 02, 2004 |
12 July 2003
Cojuangco loses UCPB shares to gov't, farmers.
Ending a protracted 16-year court battle, the Sandiganbayan
anti-graft court ruled on 11 July that tycoon Eduardo "Danding" Cojuangco
had illegally acquired the United Coconut Planters Bank (UCPB) with
coconut levy funds and thus forfeited his shareholdings in the bank in
favor of the government.
Source: INQ7.net
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MANUEL F. MARTINEZ
wrote:(
September 02, 2004)
The
Sandiganbayan –
anti-graft court
- Justice Teresita Leonardo de Castro and her colleagues
unanimously ruled : the levy - now swollen to over P100 billion -
was a tax. Thus, the cash belonged to the treasury.
This
position contradicted the contrary claim by Eduardo Cojuangco, Juan
Ponce Enrile, Clara Lobregat & their Philippine Coconut
Federation ( Cocofed ) friends. Levies collected by BIR and
audited by COA, they said without blinking an eyelash, “belonged to
farmers (themselves ) in their private capacities”. That’s the
language of Marcos PD 1468.
But the court refused to rewrite
the dictionary. Instead. It struck down various Cojuangco operations
for illegally using tax money for private ends.
The levy
meanwhile was used to acquire 72% of United Coconut Planters Bank (
which administers 27% voting bloc in San Miguel Corporation ),
buying 6 (of the largest) oil mills and funding 14 holding
companies.
MANUEL
F. MARTINEZ - People's Journal - Thursday,
September 02, 2004 |
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Dramatis Personae
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Eduardo
‘Danding’ Cojuangco is now Chairman and Chief Executive
and controls 20% of San Miguel Corporation, a multi-national
food company. In 2003, he ‘volunteered’ to run as President of the
Philippines, but was ridiculed out of the running. He is, of course,
contesting the 'Coco Bank' court decision, and the show will run and
run. He is a cousin of Cory
Aquino. He is shown here in another role - successful
businessman and racehorse owner in Australia, where he's managed to
invest, quite successfully, a large amount of other peasants'
money. |
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Juan Ponce
Enrile turned on and dumped Marcos
in 1986, and greatly helped the ‘EDSA People’s Power Movement’ to
its apparent success. It is doubtful if people power alone could
have swung it. He has been highly influential in the politics of the
country for the last thirty years. In 2004, when Eduardo ‘Danding’
Cojuangco’s bid as President was laughed out of contention, he
backed Fernando
Poe, Jr, an ageing, but worshipped actor, who played so many
fictional film heroes, over so many years, that he was almost a
demi-god to the ‘Masa’ the urban proletariat and country
peasants of the Philippines. |
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Ferdinand Marcos was, for a long
time, a very successful President of the Philippines, but during his
term in office, the country declined from being the best-developed
country in South-East Asia to one of the worst. He was ousted in
1986 by ‘People’s Power’, was whisked off to exile in Hawaii, and
died there. His remains are embalmed in his home province of Ilocos
Del Norte, where local people still fiercely respect ‘the big man’.
As of the moment, there is an ongoing court case about the
non-payment of electricity bills for his mausoleum.
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Cory Aquino ‘The People’s President’ of the
1986. ‘EDSA People’s Power Movement’ that overthrew Marcos. Aquino
introduced several ‘people-friendly’ measures to help the poor,
including access to large estates of absentee landowners for the
landless peasants. These did not apply to her own family estate, the
Hacienda Luisita in Tarlac, Luzon. Last year (2004) when a
delegation of landless tenants protested on the 'little family
farm', 14 of them were shot dead. |
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Joseph 'Erap'
Estrada was an actor/president, put in
position by 'Trapos' - traditional politicians. He has
nothing much to do with this story, except for enacting, late at
night, under the influence of drink, an order delaying the
government's court cases against Cojuangco.
Regrettably, he was caught red-handed accepting bagfuls of money
from illegal gambling games, and having bank accounts in false
names. He was ousted, after a campaign -'EDSA II' - the first,
worldwide, 'revolution' organised by cell phone, in favour of his
Vice President, Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo. This picture accompanied his 1998
election campaign - he wrote next to it -' In my
28 years as a public official, my track record is unblemished. I was
never linked to graft and corruption and other
anomalies.' |
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Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo, aka GMA and
Glorietta, is currently doing a grand job of leading her
country further downhill. She is the current - (Monday, May 08, 2006
) - President of the
Republic of the Philippines, although coup attempts or plots are
reported every other day. She is a sweet little lady, with a very
attractive mole on her left cheek, and she once attended the same
economics class as Bill Clinton. He was
rather more successful in his economic policies, but then, he had
better material to work on. But she's just as devious as any other
politician, and fiddles elections just as much as any American
President. |
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Fernando Poe, Jr died in
December 2004, officially from a stroke, but, most said, from a
broken heart. A very private man, despite his public image, he was
exploited by the likes of Cojuangco and Enrile to run as
Presidential figurehead, but lost, heavily. His ‘friends’, of
course, deserted him after that.
Glorietta
was caught, on tape, discussing just how much she should
win by, with the Election Commissioner, just last summer
(2005), so maybe he didn't lose so heavily after
all. |
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US Government officials and economists
advised, plotted
and assisted all of the major figures in this scam, and still do,
although most of their agencies have now been ‘privatized’ under new
governmental procedure fashions. Most of them remain anonymous, and probably did what they
did for the best of motives, such as patriotism, honor,
etc. |
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Half a million coconut
farmers, their workers, and all their families, who were robbed
blind over more than a generation, and still have nothing to show
for it. |
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Don’t laugh
or snigger too much at this story of evil
Third World financiers and politicians.
The last I heard was
that Kenneth Lay (Enron scam - ‘Kenny Boy’ to George W Bush), and Neil Bush (Savings & Loans scam
- brother to George W Bush) are still roaming free and
innocently unprosecuted.
And Dick Cheney is still Vice
President.
Lidy Thatcher saved up her wages (less than
those of a second-rate New Jersey widget-maker) and is now a
millionairess. She did nothing much, directly or personally, to this
average tale of rape and pillage, but I thought I'd include her
anyway | |
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