A tale of two recent events regarding bees and coconuts
ITEM: The Secretary of Agriculture, it was earlier reported, was not about to reconsider, much less revoke, the controversial Administrative Order (or AO) that had taken away the bees from plant protection quarantine. Through his Undersecretary for legal affairs concurrently his Chief of Staff (Usec Palad), he called a meeting last Friday, 9th November, on bee matters in general but not particularly about the AO.
In fact right at the start of the meeting attended by “all sides” of the controversy, Usec Palad already made it clear that there was no turning back on the AO, as far as the Secretary was concerned, leading the ABC or Alliance of Bees and Coconuts to immediately prepare to walk out – but in the end, incredible as it did sound, the same senior official of the Department ordered a review to be finished within this month. What happened? Whatever the reasons, the decision was a miracle – or the beginning of it.
ITEM: The National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) Secretary and “Lead Convenor” of the Task Force on coco levy funds utilization – actually did it. No, he did not blush nor felt he ever had to. Going straight to the point (“straight” but not as in the Pilipino term “tuwid”), he of Akbayan party wrote his buddy, the Secretary of Budget and Management and leader of the Liberal Party, with whom he has a tight united front within the government, to please release immediately to him from the coconut levy funds the sum of Php 635, 593,750.00 – and for what? For “program management and convergence coordination.”
Yes, this was an incredible feat of linguistic substitution for historical reality – the capacity to ask so much, so soon, for the financial empowerment of so small a government agency not even mandated under law to have anything to do with the coconut levy.
Firstly, is the DA-AO No. 14 legal?
Every one has heard the famous phrase, “presumption of regularity,” regarding issuances and orders coming from government agencies. Unless, of course, an order is patently against existing law that someone or some group will have no choice but to call the government’s attention.
The case of the Department of Agriculture-Administrative Order No. 14 is a case in point. As elementary as ABC, the Alliance of Bees and Coconuts has to call the DA Secretary’s attention to his illegal administrative order. In a friendly, understanding context, better for him to review it now than have some other body do so, to his everlasting embarrassment.
When ABC asked the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) point-blank whether it had recommended its own withdrawal from a legal mandate, their reply was quick and clear – no, they had not. So, who did, and for how many reasons? Who said the clock was broke and that therefore it had to be fixed? No one owned up to the paternity of the AO baby, prompting some to speculate that an absent consultant with possible interest conflicts did.
Under law, it is the Bureau of Plant Industry (BPI) that handles the quarantining of imported bees, in collaboration with UPLB (University of the Philippines Los Banos). These agencies have strict requirements for importation.
The mandate of BPI is pursuant to the Plant Quarantine Act (Act 3027, dated March 8, 1922; Act 3767, dated November 26, 1930), revised through Presidential Decree 1433 (dated1978, promulgating the Plant Quarantine Law of 1978), thereby revising and consolidating existing plant quarantine laws to further improve and strengthen the Plant Quarantine Services of the Bureau of Plant Industry.
The scientific rationale for the law is that bees pollute crops; they are potential vectors of plant diseases. A pest of bees like the small hive beetles, Aethina tumida, could infest avocado, mango, pineapple, papaya and other fruits – could, in fact, wipe orchards out of existence. It thus makes sense that phytosanitary personnel should handle this quarantining job.
In both the U.K. and the U.S., for instance, bees are under the Plant Protection Division of the Department of Agriculture, although bees there, like here, are indeed considered not plants but animals – an obviously known fact that has never been considered a valid premise for concluding, as some brilliant latter-day consultants here recently did when they advised the Secretary of Agriculture, that therefore the Bureau of Animal Industry (BAI) should put aside the Plant Quarantine Act and do the quarantining themselves.
They would even argue that under the Terrestrial Animal Health Code, official controls for bees should be under veterinary authority and thus should be with the Bureau of Animal Industry. While we should always respect international codes, however, we should apply their sense to our situation intelligently – not mechanistically. Just consider the following and see what makes sense: under Philippine law and practice, veterinarians are those who specialize in the monitoring, prevention, control and eradication of diseases of farm animals, companion animals and wild animals, excluding bees.
The United Kingdom is also a signatory to the Terrestrial Animal code but places bees under Plant Quarantine. Indeed, the bee inspectors of both Australia and the USDA, like those of the UK are not veterinarians but entomologists. In the US, too, bees and beekeeping equipment are regulated by Plant Protection and Quarantine.
Those tasked by the Department for the AO review are the Bureau of Plant Industry and the Bureau of Animal Industry. The ABC again submitted a paper, “Why Bees Should Be Under Plant Protection Quarantine.” Wanted, urgently: someone with King Solomon’s DNA at the Office of the DA Secretary. And equally urgently, wanted: someone who can expose the wise acre of a consultant who almost succeeded in making a fool of the Secretary of Agriculture at the cost of fatally endangering Apiculture or the Honeybee Industry.
In the matter of coco levy funds utilization
It is not the proposed government-and-farmers Foundation, which is still to be established by law, nor the Philippine Coconut Authority (PCA) which under current law is the sole mandated government agency in charge of the coconut industry, but two fast runners unrelated to the coconut industry, the DSWD (Department of Social Welfare and Development) and NAPC (National Anti-Poverty Commission), who may yet be the first, illegally, to corner more than six hundred million pesos of the coconut farmers money, if they will have their way, for the time period November 2012 to December 2013.
DSWD and NAPC are unabashedly asking DBM to release to them the modest sums of P121,778, 750 and P533,815,000 respectively: DSWD saying it needs that amount to add to its already gargantuan “Cash for Work” expenditures, and NAPC for “Program Management and Convergence Coordination.”
In addition, salivating at the billions more of farmers’ money recently declared public trust funds by the Supreme Court, NAPC, in addition to the foregoing request for Special Allotment Release Order (SARO), and the subsequent Notice of Cash Allocation (NCA) for November 2012, has now also served notice in that same 25 October 2012 letter to Secretary Abad, that it will soon, within November, be submitting more requests amounting to P934-M to include programs fast tracking land-acquisition-and-distribution in coconut lands by DAR, insurance coverage of farmers by DOH, educational assistance by Deped and CHED and Tesda, and agro-enterprise development by DA and DAR.
Coconut farmers find these latest piratical attacks on their coco levy funds simply unconscionable. The old Marcos-Danding regime pirates seem to be all but gone but there is now on the horizon, no – in the neighborhood – new pirates in official government garb, so eager, so ready, so quick with the coconut farmers’ money without the least bit of consultation with the farmers’ own organizations. However, the farmers have spoken. There ought to be a law on these recovered coco levy funds. The Supreme Court doctrine of dual ownership by government (trustee owner) and farmers (beneficial owners) must be upheld. For the immediate, hands off, everyone! Only the PCA is legit in tandem with the coconut farmers themselves. The two have made their own roadmap towards the development of the coconut industry. FINIS