Undermined

Faced with the respective obsessions of Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and DAR secretary Rafael Mariano, banana giant Tadeco has made plans to move its farm to the town of Cateel. That is bad news for the thousands of workers, inmates and settlers who benefit from the pioneering banana plantation.

The troubles thrown at Tadeco, a company that holds the best record for productivity in the banana industry, come at a time when we have opened new markets in China and Russia for our agricultural exports. Banana is about the only crop that has kept our agricultural exports going.

Alvarez, for the pettiest reasons, has been using every political resource at his disposal to nullify the joint venture contract between Tadeco and the Bureau of Corrections (Bucor). That contract allowed inmates to be employed at the farm, enjoy educational and health benefits and prepare for reintegration with society. It allowed the Bucor an income stream to better care for its inmates.

I met with several ex-convicts last week in Davao. They all chose to continue working with Tadeco after their release, bringing in their families to live at the farm. Some of them were able to send their children through school from income derived from working in the plantation. They dread the possibility of the farm’s closure.

The DAR secretary, for his part, has been on a strange crusade to break up the highly productive banana plantations and distribute the land to independent farmers. He does not seem to understand that banana cultivation is heavily capitalized, highly integrated and reliant on scientific applications.

Tadeco, in particular, sits on marshland unsuitable for any other crop besides abaca (which has lost its market) and bananas (whose economic future is most promising). If the marshland is distributed to subsistence farmers, they will starve.

Tadeco exports 26 million boxes of bananas a year. Of that total, 15 million emanates from the Davao Penal Colony farm. The company will survive even if Alvarez succeeds in breaking the joint venture agreement. The farmers there might not.

We have a trade deficit as things stand. Our banana exports will take a major hit if Alvarez and Mariano get their way in undermining the most productive enterprises in Mindanao. Our banana industry accounts for billions of dollars of export revenues.

These two officials have distinct motivations for undermining the banana plantations. But they seem to be jointly in the business of killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Unpaid

The single biggest source of dysfunction at the MRT-3 line is DOTC Undersecretary for Rails Cesar Chavez.

He has refused to pay out government obligations to the current service provider. Those obligations now add up to P300 million.

Having withheld payment, he then rounded up consultants drawn from rival bidders to pass judgment on whether the service provider should be paid at all. The contract provides that BURI be paid monthly for its maintenance work.

The man seems to be on a mission to disable the service provider, cause failure in service and then cancel the contract on that basis. There is something truly suspicious going on here, something the Senate committee looking into the matter might have missed.

Unfortunately for Chavez, service provider Busan Universal Rail Inc. (BURI) has decided to protect its reputation even if it means foregoing profit. The service provider borrowed money from the banks to enable it to deliver its part of the contract even if the DOTr tries to starve it for funds. The additional financing costs will, of course, be to the service provider’s account.

Before Sen. Grace Poe’s committee, Chavez lied blatantly about the comparative performance of the three light rail lines. He claimed LRT-2 was better performing than MRT-3.

The key performance indicator here is what is called the operational fleet availability. Since it was contracted, BURI went on an aggressive parts procurement program enabling it to restore 20 rail cars back to operability. As a result of that, MRT-3 now has an operational fleet availability of 66 out of 72 cars (91.67%). LRT-1 has a fleet availability of 102 out of 139 cars (73.38%) while LRT-2 has only 28 out of 72 cars (38.89%).

In a few months, the service provider plans to deploy the motor-less cars Jun Abaya purchased from Dalian by adding these cars as the fourth vehicle in the existing three-vehicle trains. This will substantially increase MRT-3’s capacity.

Not much could be done to improve the speed of the rail service unless the DOTr replaces the decrepit rails. There has been no motion on the part of DOTr in this regard.

Most of the glitches that happened in the rail line’s operation is attributable to the decrepit signaling system being used. The procurement of a modern signaling system is DOTr’s responsibility. Again, nothing has been done to this end. Instead Chavez chooses to attribute all fault to the maintenance provider.

Chavez proposes putting the MRT-3 line under the supervision of the LRTA which runs the two other light rail lines that, by the way, suffers from the same glitches. That is the intermediate step to privatizing the system – which appears to be Chavez’s hidden agenda.

While the DOTr plays its usual game of assigning blame and fussing with contracts, the city’s commuter rails are deteriorating by the day. The transport agency seems content to allow things to get worse as a prelude to privatization.

Meanwhile, commuters suffer untold harm each day while the service rots and officials flaunt their incompetence.