Coco Levy bill may lapse into law next week mb.com.ph - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from mb.com.ph Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
#Bulatlat20: Reaffirming truth-telling, defending press freedom
Bulatlat‘s commitment to human rights reporting and how it has remained true to truthtelling.
By JANESS ANN J. ELLAO
Bulatlat.
As an alternative media, it was expected to actively report on the worsening extrajudicial killings – at least one activist killed per week – and other forms of human rights violations under a bloody counterinsurgency campaign spearheaded by the now-convicted former General Jovito Palparan Jr.
While these were covered by
Bulatlat, human rights stories seldom hogged the headlines in the dominant media. This situation was similar to the early days of the late President Corazon Aquino, where, in the guise of upholding “news values” and blindly working on the narrative that “democracy” has been restored, human rights violations were no longer considered newsworthy.
Atty. Joey Lina
I would like to share the insights of former Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor, chairman of the Federation of Free Farmers, about the predicament of the nation’s coconut farmers who remain poor despite the Coco Levy Fund worth billions of pesos that’s supposed to help them.
In an article titled “Can UCPB, Land Bank and Coco Levy Fund meet credit needs of Coconut Farmers?” which Montemayor co-wrote with Edgardo C. Amistad, former president of the UCPB-CIIF Finance and Development Corporation, answers can be found to questions troubling the coconut industry.
Foremost among them are: How come coco farmers hardly benefitted from the fund established for them four decades ago? What ought to be done now to improve their plight and boost the coconut industry?
Published December 19, 2020, 5:00 AM
Amid growing opposition against the proposed Coconut Farmers and Industry Trust Fund (Coco Levy Act), which will pave the way for the release of the P100-billion coco levy fund, Agriculture Secretary William Dar has made an appeal to coconut farmers to give the law a chance.
Agriculture Secretary William Dar (Photo credit: https://www.da.gov.ph/)
This was Dar’s reaction to coconut farmers’ call for President Rodrigo Duterte to veto the proposed Coco Levy Act if ever it makes it through the bicameral process without addressing the concerns of the farmers on the unfavorable provisions of the House and Senate versions of the bill.
Published December 17, 2020, 6:00 AM
On the anticipated release of the P100-billion coco levy fund, another veto is coconut farmers’ last hope after the House version of Coconut Farmers and Industry Trust Fund (Coco Levy Act) was passed on third and final reading and turned out to be “worse than the Senate version of the law”.
That, if President Rodrigo Duterte will not intervene before the law gets through the bicameral, where both houses of Congress will consolidate two versions of Coco Levy Act.
(MB FILE, Keith Bacongco)
“I called the staff of Congressman Mark Enverga [Quezon 1st District and chairman of the House’s agriculture committee] to insert the provisions that we want in the bicam, but if this is not possible, this is the right time for President Duterte to veto the law again,” Pambansang Kilusan ng Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (PKMP) Chairman Eduardo Mora said in a phone interview.