Locals worry over Del Monte expansion

By Lina Sagaral Reyes
Special Correspondent

First of Two Parts

CLAVERIA, Misamis Oriental – “It was skinning the land bare,” Marcelino Patindol recalled, as he described how in 2017 a bulldozer cleared reforested and contoured hillsides to make way for a pineapple plantation in Barangay Aposkahoy, in this municipality, 45 minutes away from Cagayan de Oro City.

“Hurot tanan, walay pasayloon,” he added in Binisaya, meaning nothing was spared in the bulldozer’s path.

Soon, the tough-leafed high-value crop clumped on the Aposkahoy hillsides where once young trees were growing.

The 137-hectare plantation, grown on Higaonon ancestral domain, was an nth expansion field of Del Monte Philippines, a transnational pineapple grower that had been in Mindanao for nearly a century.

The firm is a subsidiary of Del Monte Pacific Limited (DMPL), 71 percent of which is owned by NutriAsia Limited and beneficially owned by the Campos family. Emil Javier, the renowned agronomist, and national scientist is on its corporate board of directors.

From its original, circa-1926 plantation of more than a thousand hectares in Manolo Fortich, Bukidnon, Del Monte has continued its corporate sprawl towards nine other municipalities in Bukidnon since the late 1900s, accumulating about 23,000 hectares by 2016.

Beginning in 2009, it has been making inroads into seven towns in Misamis Oriental. Already, almost two thousand hectares are located in Claveria while the rest are in the towns of Balingasag, Alubijid, Sugbongcogon, Lagonglong, Kinoguitan, and El Salvador City.

The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) had issued an environmental compliance certificate (ECC) to Del Monte in 2009 to establish pineapple plantations in 13 barangays in Claveria town, including Ani-e, Bangun-bangun, Cabacungan, Gumaod, Hinaplanan, Kalawitan, Luna, Patrocinio, Plaridel, Poblacion, Punong, Rizal, and Tambobo-an.

By 2019, DMPI had leased lands also in barangays Man-ibay, Aposkahoy, Bulahan, Lanise, Madaguing, Malagana, Sta. Cruz, and Tipolohon.

Today, with its 26,000-hectare plantations in Bukidnon and Misamis Oriental, Del Monte lords it over the production of fresh and processed pineapples in the Philippines, making it the most profitable enterprise of the DMPL conglomerate in 2017, with record sales of almost P17 billion. Del Monte sales, however, dipped by four percent in 2018 to a little more than P16 billion.                     

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, Northern Mindanao, where these corporate farms are located, produced 50.20 percent of the country’s total pineapple production in the second quarter of 2019, with Southern Mindanao, where its competitor Dole Philippines is located, coming in a far second at 25.90 percent.

“These were once denuded hills. It is part of the Mamacila CADT. We planted indigenous tree seedlings here,’’ farmer Patindol, an agroforestry practitioner, said.

(Mamacila stands for Mat-I, Man-ibay, Civoleg, Langguyod Higonon Tribal Community, Inc. and CADT is a certificate of ancestral domain title.)

He added that he had led dozens of farmer volunteers in the 2000s to teach other small holder-farmers to contour their farms on slopes and reforest logged-out parts of Claveria, including Aposkahoy, about which 137 hectares had been transformed in the past three years into pineapple fields. 

Patindol is part of Landcare Foundation, which works together with World Agroforestry Center, advocating for conservation farming technologies, including contouring on sloping land using the naturally growing grass strips coupled with planting endemic fruit-bearing and industrial trees.

In principle, Landcare Foundation and Del Monte both believe in planting trees for climate mitigation as they are popularly considered the most efficient and cheapest carbon sinks or absorbers of carbon dioxide.

Del Monte spotlighted the thousands of trees it has grown in its Sustainability Report 2019 as its contribution to the accomplishment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), under Goal 13 on climate action. The goal is to mobilize US$100 billion a year beginning 2020 to aid the developing countries in mitigating the impacts of global heating. The SDG goal 17 recognizes the role of the private sector and partnership among governments, private businesses, and civil society to meet the SGDs by 2030. 

Meanwhile, sustainability reporting, also known as triple-bottom-line reporting, is the practice of publicly reporting on a firm’s significant economic, environmental and social impacts, based on globally accepted standards. DMPL uses the standards developed by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). It is among the dozen of publicly-listed corporations (PLCs) that voluntarily published a Sustainability Report in 2019, a year before the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) required its 162 PLCs to submit a Sustainability Report. The SEC, on GRI’s encouragement, mandated these PLCs to submit a Sustainability Report by 2020 along with their annual reports and that these reports must highlight climate-related risks and opportunities.

On the other hand, Patindol said the spread of corporate plantations was worrisome. “What is the long-term effect of the practice of monoculture here when most of Claveria is sloping land and 60 percent forestal?’’

He foresaw heavy erosion, fertilizer and pesticide run-offs, silt on Tikala and Cabulig rivers, and unprotected watersheds.

But the vision of the local government includes the hosting of intensive-farming agricultural corporations from which tax revenues, livelihood opportunities, and increased support services to its residents can be obtained, he observed.

Among those who had established farms are Del Monte and banana grower Dole while PMFTC, a subsidiary of tobacco company Philip Morris International until last year engaged local farmers in contract growing of Virginia tobacco.

Bothered by the creeping industrial farmland expansion, Patindol, who chairs the municipal agricultural and fisheries council (MAFC), spearheaded a resolution last year urging the town leadership to regulate corporate expansion and provide buffer zones for biodiversity, soil conservation, and watershed protection.

The MAFC is a stakeholder local governance consultative mechanism that inputs into the legislative and administrative processes of the town. The council’s resolution urged for the lowering of the area allowed for cultivation by large corporations in the town’s comprehensive land-use and development plan (Clup). Other government agencies serving as consultants to the Clup drafting, such as the Housing and Land-Use Regulatory Board (HLURB), supported the council’s move.

As a result, the Claveria Clup, now part of the Zoning Ordinance approved in September 2019, has halved the agro-industrial zones to only 5,000 from the 10,000 hectares lobbied for by agri-industrial companies, including Del Monte.

According to the Clup maps produced by the planning and development office, only 465.7527 hectares, about 24 percent of Clup’s total of 1,918 hectares, is within the agro-industrial zone, excluding, among others, the 137 hectares in Aposkahoy.

The Sangguniang Bayan, however, had agreed to allow Clup to continue tilling the contracted areas outside the agri-industrial zone until the leasehold contracts expire but the company can no longer expand their fields outside of the identified zone. 

The town’s agricultural area of about 24,000 hectares is 29 percent of its total land area of 84,000 hectares, which, in turn, is practically a third of Misamis Oriental’s total land area. The Del Monte sprawl of 1,918.47 hectares represents nearly eight percent of the town’s available arable land. (to be concluded)

(This story was produced as part of the ‘Exploring Corporate Impact’ Programme, a joint project of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and the Thomson Reuters Foundation funded by the GRI. More information at https://www.globalreporting/information/sustainability-reporting/Pages/default.aspx. The content is the sole responsibility of the author.)