Workers on a Philippine coconut farm: born poor and stay poor
Like most people who work in the coconut groves on the northern edge of the Philippine island of Mindanao, Diego G. Limbaro never imagined another life. His father pulled himself up on the skinny tree trunks of the surrounding plantations and brandished a machete to loosen the coconuts. So did his father’s father.
Such multigenerational experiences are typical of the entire province of Misamis Oriental. Harvesting coconuts – separating the flesh from the husk and processing the yield into oil and juice – is one of the few ways to make a living.
People work six days a week in the tropical heat, through torrential rain and under the punishing sun. Their wages are determined by the price of coconut oil, as influenced by traders around the world. The average farmer earns perhaps 60,000 pesos a year – about $1,100.
“We are poor here,” Mr. Limbaro said one recent morning, as a steady drizzle turned the reddish soil to mud. “We only buy sardines and rice. For most people here, the life they are born into is the life they will live.”
At 64, Mr. Limbaro’s life is dominated by two pursuits: playing basketball on the concrete courts that form the center of every village, and running a copra cooperative that offers local farmers a way to join forces .
Farmers typically harvest coconuts from their own small holdings, remove the husks, and sell much of the shell-wrapped fruit to agents for processing plants that make juice. They trade the rest of their harvest to drying plants in the village, where the meat is roasted over open coals, producing a product that is sold to processing plants that grind it into oil.
The plants that dry the fruit, which burn coconut husks for energy, are mostly owned by local women like Mercita Rementizo, 65, who also operates a local grocery kiosk. She earns extra money as a music teacher and as a drummer in a family band that plays tango, jazz and rock classics at village festivals.
“I have a lot of side hustle,” she said. “Everyone here does that.”
Mr Limbaro said he was fully relying on women to fill the ranks of the cooperative’s board. “Women are more productive than men,” he said matter-of-factly. “The women don’t gamble, drink or make women. I trust women the most.”
The main function of the cooperative is to arrange transportation of coconuts to processing factories. That task has become much more difficult in recent months after the organization’s truck broke down. It lies in the mud under a tarpaulin, its sides rusted and peeling paint, motionless for lack of the 150,000 pesos (about $2,600) needed to repair it.
The cooperative is therefore at the mercy of the buyer’s agents, who charge the transport costs to the members. These additional costs come just as copra prices have fallen dramatically this year, grouse farmers. No one is entirely clear on the cause, although people are speculating about a glut of palm oil – an alternative to coconut oil for cooking – as major producers in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia ramp up production.
Mr. Limbaro remains stoic in the face of such forces.
He feels his own mortality as he draws his sustenance from trees, some a century old, that connect the ground to the sky.
“This is the only resource available here,” he said. “The coconuts will still be there even after I die.”