31 Years of Transformative Power
COOPERATIVE Development Authority (CDA) Chairman Orlando “Orlan” Ravanera speaks like a charismatic televangelist trying to save Filipino farmers, workers and indigenous people (IP), and in an interview with The Manila Times on the occasion of the CDA’s 31st anniversary, he seems to have coconuts on his mind.
“That’s just being bought at P5 per kilo. The coconut is a billion-dollar industry, but the coco farmer is the poorest of the poor. Kaya nagrebelde kami (That’s why we rebelled),” narrates the chairman not about his own revolution, but of the struggle of the men of Abdullah Goldiano Makapaar bin Sabbar aka “Commander Bravo,” the chief of the northwestern Mindanao arm of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), who laid down their arms in KuraKura, Lanao del Norte and requested Ravanera to organize the 15,000 former combatants and hundreds of division commanders into 101 cooperatives in two weeks’ time.
This, according to Ravanera, resulted in the ex-combatants shouting in unison, “Sama-sama na tayo; isa lang ang armas natin ngayon: kooperatiba (We are united now with one weapon: cooperativism)!”
And this led the northeastern front of the MILF, headed by Sultan Abdul Ayunan Amoran, as well as the 10,000-strong Manobo community of Sibagat in Agusan del Sur, headed by its chieftain, Arnold M. Acebedo, formerly known as “Datu Subang” in his days as a New People’s Army commander, to follow suit. This, the CDA chairman adds, attests to the transformative power of cooperativism for prosperity, food security, ecological stewardship and peace, particularly in war-torn rural areas of the provinces.
In the true spirit of cooperativism, says Ravanera, rural folk and IPs have been organized for over three decades in order that their ancestral lands are made more productive to countervail poverty and climate change, among other social ills. One such current program of the CDA in cooperation with India involves the planting of bamboo on “hundreds of thousands of hectares” of IP land. Aside from the economic value that bamboo groves can produce once harvested, these highly absorbent plants provide natural flood control and carbon-sink protection against the effects of global warming. For food security and in support of the government’s Balik Probinsya, Bagong Pagasa program following the pandemic, the CDA has also ”put up a training center in the hinterlands.”
To date, the chairman attests, the total cash donations and initiatives for pandemic support from 18,581 cooperative organizations has amounted to P5.43 billion for the benefit of medical frontliners, local government units, cooperative members and even nonmembers. After the CDA had circulated a letter among all the cooperatives, asking them to “please serve the least of our brethren,” the members did not hesitate to stand up for their communities.
“Would you believe,” shares Ravanera, “one cooperative alone provided [IPs] with several 10-wheeler trucks full of food worth hundreds of thousands.”
Ever quotable, the CDA chairman sums up all that transformative power with the unshakable faith that, “In the darkness caused by the pandemic, the spirit of compassion and service shines through.”CDA chairman sums up all that transformative power with the unshakable faith that, “In the darkness caused by the pandemic, the spirit of compassion and service shines through.”