Farmers in Negros Occidental have asked the Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR) to revoke the 20-year-old joint venture agreement (JVA) between the late business tycoon Eduardo Cojuangco and the ECJ Farm Workers Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Multi-Purpose Cooperative (Efarbempco), citing irregularity.
In an exclusive interview, DAR Secretary Conrado Estrella III said he would welcome a dialogue with farmers only from Negros Occidental but not with the Batangas farmers, who would accompany the Negros farmers in a planned camp-out in front of the Department of Agrarian Reform central office in Quezon City today.
Task Force Mapalad, a federation of farmers and farm workers nationwide, said the Negros farmers, along with the Batangas farmers, would storm DAR.
“I will let the Negros farmers enter my office if I am already well tomorrow (Monday). I am now sick after the land distribution in Agusan del Sur,” Estrella told the Manila Standard.
Marianito Josilva of Hugpong ECJ nag Mamumugon kag ARBs, in an eight-page letter to Estrella III, said the JVA will expire this year, and that the farmer-beneficiaries want the land to be returned to them through the cancellation of their collective certificates of land ownership registered in the name of Efarbempco.
He appealed to the Presidential Agrarian Reform Council, chaired by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., not to renew the JVA.
He urged Estrella to proceed with the Project SPLIT (Support to Parcelization of Lands for Individual Titling) in the 4,654-hectare disputed land, and help “stop all forms of harassment and protect the farmers’ rights to life and freedom of expression and organization.”
DAR adopted the voluntary land transfer/direct payment scheme as the mode of farmers’ cooperative ownership in 2004.
The farmers, along with Task Force Mapalad, are set to camp out at the DAR central office in Quezon City today.
Under the JVA, 70 percent of the landholdings’ income goes to the Conjuanco-owned ECJ Corp., while the farmers’ share is just 30 percent, Josilva lamented.
He said they have become poorer, adding the average gross salary of each coop member is only worth P4,900 a month with deductions for his or her Social Security System and Pag-IBIG contributions, withholding tax and loans.
He asserted that in 2017, DAR’s National Agribusiness Venture Arrangements Evaluation Committee recommended to Malacañang the JVA revocation for failure to improve the lives of the farmers.
The cooperative wants to be renamed as the ECJ Negros Farms Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries Cooperative that shall enter into a new venture partnership once the old JVA expires in 2024, he maintained.