Euro Filipino Journal: Lloyd Tronco

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Back in the early 1990s, I set up a 
boutique ad agency in Bacolod to service the needs of local clients who 
wanted to take their marketing efforts to a level much higher than the usual tombstone ads they would find in Bacolod's leading daily, The Visayan Daily Star.  Some
 of the work emanating from that agency is still alive and well today 
and is in fact is part of Bacolod's brand icons.  We're talking about 
the logo, menu, and place mat of Bob's Restaurant. One of the 
most interesting work we did in that boutique agency with my college 
buddy, Julie May Calderon, had to do with the Lopez Sugar Corporation.  
There was a window for a marketing advantage seen by Lopez Sugar 
Executive Vice President, Eusebio "Butch" Lopez, given the furor that 
was rattling the sugar industry in Negros at that time. The talk 
of the day was about the "Sugar-less Quedans" in some mills.  For those 
who are not familiar with the system in sugar farming, the Quedan is 
the warehouse receipt that functions as the sugar industry's most 
important negotiable instrument.  And because it is a negotiable 
instrument which represents physical sugar stored in a mill, the Quedan 
can change owners several times through trading before the physical 
stocks are withdrawn.  Under the Warehouse Receipt Law, a mill assumes 
sole responsibility for the protection of the sugar stocks represented 
by the piece of paper known as the Quedan.   
 Our small agency came up with a 
campaign which basically presented two versions in print media.  The 
first graphic we used was that of a baby.  The proposition was that if a
 planter milled with Lopez, he or she could sleep like a baby, knowing 
fully well that their Quedans were at all times backed up with physical 
sugar in the mill.  We knew that as the "Sleep Like A Baby" version. The
 next wave of the campaign showed an actual photo of a planter smiling. 
 For that layout, we showed Benjie Gonzaga standing in his garden giving
 his own version of a contented smile.  The headline was simple, "This 
Planter has Peace of Mind".  The rationale behind the contented smile 
and the headline was explained in the copy.  I waxed nostalgic 
today remembering a fun time of running a creative advertising operation
 in a land which mainly thrived on agriculture and where appreciation 
for the creativity was scarce.  I look back to that time and am very 
thankful to Butch Lopez whose genius in marketing allowed us the space 
to create a campaign so unique.  After all, when was the last time you 
have heard of a sugar mill advertising? I write these today 
because yesterday, I read the news that about P47-million worth of sugar
 stock inside a warehouse at the Batangas Sugar Central in Balayan town 
is missing. The sugar central is a repository of the Sugar 
Regulatory Administration (SRA) of all sugar stocks harvested in 
Southern Luzon.  And again, under the law, all sugar stocks are to be 
turned over to the SRA, which deposits them in the warehouses of sugar 
centrals, before these are released to their dealers. Another case of "Sugar-less Quedan" only this time outside Negros. True enough, the unique selling proposition of a mill is not just its efficiency but its integrity. 
 
 
 
 
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Essays Lloyd Tronco Understanding The Quedan - The Sugar Warehouse Receipt

Back in the early 1990s, I set up a boutique ad agency in Bacolod to service the needs of local clients who wanted to take their ...

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During the American period, there was 
this program known as the Homestead Act. This was patterned after the 
same program wherein Americans went west and founded their own farms and
 homesteads. Now, American agriculture is a Titan in their economy. 
Further along there was the Land Reform initiated by President Diosdado 
Macapagal and of course, when Martial Law was declared in September 21, 
1972, President Ferdinand Marcos declared the entire country a “Land 
Reform Zone”. During the reinstallation of Congress in 1988, the 
Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) was enacted into law and 
then CARPer during the GMA administration. 
 One question begs to be answered. 
How come the great majority of rural Filipinos remain poor? Why have 
these laws and programs failed dismally inspite of all the good 
intentions that was behind them? It is evident that no matter how noble 
the intention of giving land to the landless, there was no support 
mechanism in place for the Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARBs). This 
has also indirectly contributed to decreasing productivity in land 
reform areas. But the real tragedy is that the ARBs became poorer and 
more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of fate and economic dynamics. Maybe
 it is time that we look hard into this supposed economic “cure all”, 
whether it is a case of twisted economic idealism or twisted economic 
romanticism. As quoted : “It was a political solution to an economic 
problem”, now we find ourselves in this situation and it is not bound to
 get better if the system is not revised. It has been a generation since
 CARP was enacted into law. Let us try to save another generation from 
lives of hardship and misery. I was prompted to put forth the 
lines above because of a 2007 account I read in the blog of deceased but
 well respected journalist Ding Gagelonia.  The account went this way: 
The True Picture of CARP in Negros Occidental 
 
We had just had a most unusual lunch 
experience. I sat across a group of people known as ARB’s – Agrarian 
Reform Beneficiaries. These are families who were once farm laborers in 
large haciendas but, thanks to the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian 
Reform Program (CARP), are now proud owners of the land they once tilled
 on behalf of their landlords. Over fried chicken, rice and a hot fudge 
sundae, I listened to the people sharing the meal with me. They told us 
of their struggles, of the hardships they have all endured, both before 
and after they became beneficiaries of CARP. 
I have a lump in my throat the whole 
time I am writing this piece as I struggle with my own feelings. I am 
not a prolific writer. I write only when I feel the urge. Right now I am
 writing because I feel compelled to write. 
I had seen the headlines only weeks ago 
and read about the bloodshed in their lands. We are in the famed island 
of Negros, where, in places like Hacienda Velez-Malaga, so many lives 
have been wasted in the name of Agrarian Reform. I saw the special 
report in one of ABS-CBN’s late night documentary-type shows. I had 
prepared myself for an emotional moment. But I didn’t prepare myself for
 a guilt trip. 
Yes, lunch was one big guilt trip. I 
kept asking myself, How can I stand this? Here I am, 3G cellphone in 
hand and staying at a luxury hotel, how can I live with myself, with my 
30 pounds of excess weight from, well, overeating… how can I face this 
other creature of God in front of me and not feel guilty? At sixteen, 
she is barely four feet tall. No, she is not a natural dwarf, and she 
doesn’t look like those Ethiopian malnourished children from war-torn 
Africa that we used to see on the internet. But malnourished she is, 
nonetheless, hence the stunted growth. She stopped growing when at age 7
 she started working in the sugarcane fields. She’s been out of school 
since grade four, and while she dreams of becoming a teacher someday, 
she knows that every year that passes, that dream becomes more and more 
unlikely to happen, because she has been out of school for six years 
now. 
Working under the hot sun from sun-up to
 sundown, her skin is as dark as the purplish sugarcane in the fields 
that she tends. Because her body has been strained by hard labor, she is
 not skin and bones. Instead she is muscular like a farm-hand young boy.
 Indeed, if not for the name, she could be mistaken for a boy. 
She had a good meal today, probably the 
only one like it in weeks, if not months. Yet she could not muster a 
smile for my camera. The other people in her group confirmed what I had 
seen on TV. That indeed there are people in their neighborhood who 
gather certain types of stones from a river and boil them to extract 
their “flavor” so that they could have some soup. They said it’s not 
always that bad. On good days they get to catch some frogs. So I noticed
 they purposely did not finish the two pieces of chicken in front of 
them. They ate one and they had the other one wrapped to be brought 
home. God knows how many more mouths those will feed tonight. 
Edelyn hardly speaks. She will only 
respond when asked directly, and her answers are typically only a few 
words. And tears well in her eyes as she struggles to answer my 
questions. So the older women do the talking. And tell her story for 
her. I asked her if indeed she knew how to dress and broil a frog, as 
claimed by one of the older women. She nods, and for a fleeting moment I
 thought I sensed a faint smile – borne maybe out of pride in her shall 
we say, unusual culinary skills. In their village, about five kilometers
 from the town of Murcia, they have no electricity. Officially, all the 
barangays in their town have electricity, but their village is too far 
away from the nearest cables. And they have no water. They walk two 
kilometers to the nearest water source, a natural spring, for every drop
 of water that they use – for drinking, for washing, for cooking, for 
bathing, for everything. 
I also met Sison Ventoso, a 14-year old 
boy named after Jose Maria Sison, founder of the Communist Party of the 
Philippines. That name says a lot about who his parents look up to as a 
hero. He can easily get mistaken for an 8-year old. He is that small. In
 spite of his equally stunted growth, he dreams loftier dreams – of 
becoming an engineer. Perhaps that’s because he got as far as grade 6, 
two grades higher than Edelyn. 
The typical ARB received anywhere from 
one-half to two hectares of land acquired by the government from the 
previous landowner. The government pays back the former landlords little
 by little over a ten-year period. The land is awarded to the tenants on
 the belief that as the new landowners, the former landless farmers 
become empowered and will no longer need to revolt against the 
government to remove the shackles of poverty from their heels. Land 
Reform was the perceived cure for poverty, which was the root of all 
insurgency in the past: the peasants felt they were not getting a fair 
share of the country’s wealth and natural resources. Poverty provided 
the fertile ground for the sowing of communist ideals. This is best 
exemplified by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and has been reprised
 many times in other parts of the world. 
Indeed land reform, now known as the 
comprehensive agrarian reform program, was seen as the cure for poverty,
 the root of all economic evils in our country. The simple facts are: 
the vast majority of our country is rural, and the livelihood of our 
people is mainly agriculture-based. So the thinking goes, for as long as
 most Filipinos remain poor peasants, or tenant farmers, we can never 
rise from our third-world poverty-beset situation. That is the 
socio-eco-political basis for land reform. In the words of Mayor Sonny 
Coscolluela of Murcia, it was a political solution to an economic 
problem. 
The CARP law expires next year, after a 
second ten-year extension. Before that, land reform was a landmark 
program of former president Diosdado Macapagal, father of President 
Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. And after all those years of land reform, where
 are we now? Or more significantly, where are the people – by that I 
mean the Agrarian Reform Beneficiaries (ARB’s)? 
Well I met some of them today. And it 
saddens me to acknowledge that they are in fact worse off now, 
especially when compared to their counterparts who have remained working
 as farm laborers in the big haciendas. While the ARB families are 
starving, their counterpart families in the big plantations have a good 
life. Their landlords provide for all, repeat, ALL their needs. They 
have food on the table, and in the ref (yes, they have refs!), they have
 fairly nice clothes, they have medical care, they have social security,
 their children go to schools right inside the hacienda. The older kids 
even go to college. And I only today did I discover the big difference: 
farm workers in the haciendas were salaried employees. As such they had 
regular wages, and all the benefits that employees normally get, 
including SSS membership. 
Sugar plantations are actually 
agro-industrial complexes, managed like regular corporations, with the 
farm workers providing the bulk of the labor force required for 
production. It’s a long process that involves prepping the land prior to
 the planting season, all through the growing stage, down to the 
harvest, collecting the canes and transporting them to the sugar mill; 
from there it goes through a second stage of production until the final 
product is produced; and from there it goes to the marketing, sales and 
distribution process before all the hard work pays off and the farm gets
 cash for its products. And sugar is a once-a-year crop. That means all 
throughout the year, the landlord advances all the costs and expenses, 
and only at the end of the long process does he get his money back. 
When the land gets covered by CARP, the 
farm workers effectively lose their jobs. The government takes the land 
away from the landowner and gives it to the farmers. So the former 
landlords stop paying any wages or any other benefits to them. They 
become entrepreneurs even if they do not know the meaning of the term. 
Given this background, it is no surprise that most of them fail at it. 
But there is more to this than meets the
 eye. In spite of their plight, the ARB’s still believe in CARP (and 
surprisingly, so do the landlords), if only because they like having 
land that they can pawn. The biggest mistake we have made is believing 
that giving the land to the farmers solves all our problems. The 
Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR), in fact bases the success of its 
program on the quantity of land that it has redistributed. With 20-20 
hindsight vision, we now know that if that alone is what gets done, then
 we are so very badly mistaken in our notion that land redistribution is
 all that needs to be done. 
The failure of CARP lies in the lack, or
 even total absence, of the support services to enable ARB’s to properly
 till their land and become economically progressive farmer families. 
What typically happens is that after ARB’s receive their land (and 
nothing else), they will need to borrow extensively just to get things 
started – buy seeds, farm implements, fertilizer, etc. (on top of their 
basic needs: food, clothing, shelter). In as short a time as two years, 
the ARB family will end up having buried itself into so much debt that 
the land they were given eventually gets sold or pawned, surreptitiously
 of course, because it is illegal to do so. How that happens is another 
story altogether. 
In the end, the family ends up so much 
worse off than before they were given their land. They still till the 
same land but now they have no more landlords to run to for help. In the
 past, whatever they needed, whatever emergency befell them, they were 
always taken care of by the landlord. Under their new situation, who do 
they turn to? One common answer: loan sharks. We already know where that
 path leads. 
Going back to our lunch guests, in spite
 of their seeming lack of education, the ARB’s were quite aware of their
 plight. They knew all along how futile the whole exercise was. They 
explained for example, how it was impossible for them to pay off their 
loans knowing how low their farm’s output would be compared to their 
needs. In some cases they only generate an income of a mere P5,000 a 
year. Even if they pull out from school all their young children and 
commit them to work the fields (not uncommon), it would still not be 
enough to feed the family. That’s because most of their income is eaten 
up by usurious rates charged by loan sharks. 
So they are forced to explore other 
income sources. They grow whatever they can grow in the little land that
 they have, but since this is too small, they send their children to the
 big cities to work as domestic helpers. One mother sent her 14-year old
 daughter to Manila. More than ten year later she has yet to hear from 
her again. And in spite of the terrible agony she suffers from not 
knowing whether her oldest daughter is alive or not, she has sent two 
more daughters to Manila, not because they needed to look for their 
elder sister, but to look for work. If you noticed that the parents 
think of their children as a “labor force,” you are right. Peasant 
farmers bear as many children as possible because indeed the children 
are “assets” – not much different from their carabaos. More children 
means more farm hands to till the land. Child labor is the norm, not the
 exception. 
In cases where their land is already 
effectively controlled by their creditors, the ARB’s end up working the 
land like they were tenant farmers all over again. If they can find work
 in other farms, such as cutting the grass in preparation for the 
planting season, they get paid P80 a day. That’s on the high side. The 
not-so-well off landowners can only afford to pay P60 a day. I cannot 
imagine how a family can live on P60 a day. It doesn’t help my 
imagination to learn that the average family here has 8 children. 
The failure that is CARP, or should I 
say, the tragedy that is CARP, creates more problems the more we 
continue its misguided implementation. Because the old landowners no 
longer own the land, they have stopped paying taxes on it. And given 
their already sorry state of financial affairs, nobody can expect the 
new landowners to pay real estate taxes either. So municipal coffers are
 now slowly seeing a continuing decline in tax collections. And with 
over-all productivity going down because of this, economic growth in the
 rural areas gets as stunted as the growth (or lack of it) of the 
malnourished children that are born to the families there. Dwindling 
economic activity in major agricultural areas is of course a vicious 
cycle that brings down the rest of the country. Not to mention the 
impact on overall literacy as more and more of the ARB’s children drop 
out of school to either work the fields, or find jobs as domestic 
helpers in the bigger cities. In some cases, they go into prostitution. 
What’s the bottom line? Why am I so 
engrossed in this unpleasant subject matter? Why do I think this 
deserves the attention I am asking everyone to give it? Because this 
affects all of us. How? Let us not forget, CARP is funded with billions 
and billions of tax money – our money. And if my tax money is being used
 to create more Edelyn Pinedas, then I feel compelled to put a stop to 
it. https://midfield.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/the-tragedy-that-is-carp/ 
 
 
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Essays Lloyd Tronco The Sisyphus Complex of Philippine Agrarian Reform

During the American period, there was this program known as the Homestead Act. This was patterned after the same program wherein America...

Euro Filipino Journal

Understanding The Quedan - The Sugar Warehouse Receipt

The Sisyphus Complex of Philippine Agrarian Reform

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