Fruits of labor: Rising costs, sinking profits dash hopes of ComVal banana farmers

It’s been 44 years since she first stepped foot in Compostela Valley, but Angela Vicente, 65, still remembers her first day of work.

Barely an adult at 21, Vicente was hungry for opportunities and decided to try her luck as a laborer in the banana farms of Barangay Osmeña, Compostela.

With her parents’ blessing, she hopped on a boat from Negros to the Mindanao province where her cousin had been working at a plantation.

The trip was her first away from home—a leap of faith in an era without cellphones and the internet—but it was one she took for the sake of a better future.

“I lived with my cousin when a company hired me. They made me go to their office, but when I was going home to my cousin’s house, I got scared. I was lost,” Vicente recalls of her first day in the municipality.

The next day, she was accepted as a laborer for the Davao Fruits Corporation (DFC), tending to the plantation and removing Sigatoka, a black and yellow fungus that grows on the leaves of banana trees.

The job wasn’t easy.  It involved 6 a.m. call times tending bananas for export.

Vicente spent the day clearing hectares of banana trees as the sun beat down her back. Her pay: 6 pesos daily.

Now, decades later, Vicente still lives in the same barangay with her family.

While she had initially gone to Compostela for work, Vicente met her husband at the plantation and ended up settling down in the area.

Outwardly, little has changed. Rows of banana trees still line the farm’s paths, and bunches of the fruit hang from is trees.

However, there is a fundamental difference: instead of working as laborers in the plantation, Vicente and many Compostela farmers are now agrarian reform beneficiaries who own an average of 0.6 hectares of land each.

It was a farmer’s dream: members of the Davao Fruits Banana Growers Agrarian Reform Cooperative (DFBGARC), one of the local cooperatives in the barangay, were awarded land titles in 2008.

But what should have spelled a win for Vicente and her fellow workers have left them at a financial deadlock instead.

While large companies no longer own the land they farm, smallholders have almost no hold on their profits, or how to run their property.

Due to restrictive long-term contracts signed with one of the country’s biggest banana exporters, Sumifru Corporation, Vicente and other small-scale producers barely eke out a living.

The Philippines, which sends Cavendish bananas to Japan, China, South Korea, and the Middle East, is one of the largest exporters of the fruit in the world.  In 2016, exports totaled USD 618 million or more than P30 billion.

The Davao region, where Compostela Valley belongs, produces the highest volume of bananas in the country.

Under their contract signed with Sumifru in 2014, DFBGARC smallholders like Vicente are paid a measly $4.25 or roughly P230 per 13.5-kilogram box of their produce.

Subtract the price of fertilizers and other farm materials and they get only a net of $3.46 or P187 per box—barely enough to support their families.

The 10-year-deal, which expires in 2024 was originally inked in 2008, but amended in 2014 after typhoon Pablo nearly wiped the plantations off the map in December 2012.

DFBGARC signed the tripartite agreement with Sumifru and the Land Bank of the Philippines after the latter required the cooperative to have a corporate partner before it approved their rehabilitation loan.

Now, they are left to deal with an arrangement that not only dictates the farming methods and fertilizers they will use, but also puts the buying price of their produce at a plateau. Years after 2014, Sumifru has had little incentives to raise buying rates for the bananas it purchases.

With their income at a flatline even as expenses rise, stakeholders like Vicente worry about how to keep within budget.

Vicente says she is left with around P300 to P200 per day to support their household of six, which includes her second son’s two children.

To make ends meet, she sometimes borrows money from her eldest son, a teacher at the town’s center.

“We work only to eat. We can no longer buy the things we want to,” she said.

But in the face of this, Vicente and other stakeholders still fight for better times ahead.

“I hope we can help the cooperative improve. I hope our income improves for the benefit of the beneficiaries and our children,” she added.

According to Vicente, it is no longer a fight for her future. At 65, she’s long past longing for material things and only wants to secure a better life for her grandchildren.

“I don’t want material things anymore because I’m old. I no longer need those material things… [I just want] to help my grandchildren for their education,” she said.