Paving the Way to Prosperity

Sitio Mapaso illustrated…

San Roque is one of the 17 barangays comprising the town of New Bataan, in the province of Compostela Valley. It is the first barangay one passes through, while cruising the national highway from New Bataan to the next municipality of Compostela Valley. The barangay is three kilometers from the center of the town, accessible by a number of passenger vehicles such as motorcycles, multi-cabs and buses.

In San Roque, one finds the sitio Mapaso, located before a river at the foot of the mountain. The area is generally planted to coconut with banana/cardaba as intercrop. Two springs development projects have been installed and funded by the CRS and the provincial government in order for them to avail of potable water. Access in going up the mountain was to cross the river through a hanging bridge.

Farmers in the locality were limited to mono-cropping, clearing and planting the slopes with corn--denuding the uplands in the process. San Roque has an estimated area of 10,000 hectares considering the irregular terrain of the barangay. Its residents originate from different places such as Bohol, Cebu and Leyte.

Cardaba Trading…

The Mapaso Small Banana Farmers Multi-Purpose Cooperative is the only cooperative engaged in banana trading in the area. It was organized in June 2000 and become a cooperative in 2002. There are three key services that MASBAFAMCO provide; namely: cardaba trading, lending and health care.

The cooperative started cardaba trading in year 2000 with the aim to provide equitable prices to cardaba farmers. Three years after, the cooperative realized the need to directly link with banana chip processors. It was at this time that the UDP, a partner of the cooperative, provided assistance in establishing direct linkage with the Commodities Corporation (ELCOCO). The direct linkage with the company enabled the cooperative to increase its canvassed volume of cardaba from an average of five tons per month to ten tons per month for two years.

The coop plans to intensify its banana trading to further expand to four other barangays in New Bataan hoping to generate more jobs and employment opportunities in the next three years. From banana dicing, it sets a vision to engage in actual trading of cardaba.

In situations where traders renege on their agreement to buy the cardaba, the cooperative has also undergone the ‘pain’ and ‘loss’ of having to look for alternative buyers for cardaba left along the streets for pick-up. It shows the dynamism of business, as well as, planning ahead for similar problems arising in the future. The plan for actual trading was considered.

The emergence of big markets for cardaba through the development of the banana chips industry gives hope to the cooperative towards achieving it goals. With the town intensifying its campaign for cardaba production and the mayor’s aggressive promotion in planting 10 hectares of land per purok with cardaba, their goal is doable.

The cooperative also provides cash advances to both member and non-member cardaba growers since 2001. The purpose was answering the needs of cardaba growers for small amounts of money necessary for their subsistence in between harvests.

From a few hundred pesos working capital in 2001, this gradually increased to about P12,000 pesos in June 2004. With the increase in capital, cash advances were also increased. Nowadays, the cooperative treats cash advances as short-term loans bearing an interest of two percent per month and a three percent service on a pre-paid basis.

It set-up a fund for hospitalization, also known as the ‘emergency fund’, seeing the difficulty of its members to look for funds to pay their medical expenses in times of need.

The cooperative’s finances show an improving performance with assets increasing from P9,396 in 2002 to P9,487 in 2003. Assets further increased by about 50 percent from January to June 2004. Aside from this, the cooperative has no external liabilities except that of the dividends and patronage refunds payable to its members.