In a roundtable discussion on local economy and microfinance last 29 May 2006, two resource persons urged PEACE to genuinely address the post-land redistribution situation of the farmers by engaging in support services designed for the ‘new landowners’.
Mr. Ramon Rogel, Kaisampalad Executive Director, and Mr. Jeff Tugawin, President of Paragon Credit, spoke about microfinance and enterprise work, respectively. Broadly defined as a set of financial services designed for the marginalized sectors of society, microfinance work, according to Rogel, has been implemented in the Philippines after it was proven feasible in poor Asian countries. “Microfinance work is a totally new area for PEACE, given its long years of focus on land reform,” Rogel said. According to Rogel, embarking on microfinance work requires intensive research on the market, that is, the intended beneficiaries, which will definitely call for reprogramming and organizational restructuring as microfinance work involves money.
For his part, Tugawin narrated how Paragon Credit succeeded from merely a small association of few members who started in 1994 with their own money at four thousand pesos and how it grew to over one thousand members with assets worth 50 million. Tugawin likewise claimed that poverty alleviation was not only the domain of NGOs involved in policy advocacy but also of socio-economic enterprises from private schools to hospitals. According to him, economic enterprises employed strategies depending on the situation of their target clientele. Two of these strategies are “hard core poor”, that is purely grant, and “credit plus”, that is, provision of affordable credit together with non-credit activities like capability building.
Tugawin challenged PEACE to engage in agricultural credit, which according to him, is in itself a form of microfinance work. According to him, this type of work is an effort to wean the new landowners away from their former landowners as well as middlemen.
Starting 1995, PEACE has focused its work on land reform issues. “Our analysis of the situation then was that poverty was widely felt in the countryside and that the folks hardly hit by the absence of rural reform are the landless farmers,” Steve Quiambao, PEACE President, said. “PEACE has since then devoted much of its resources on land tenure improvement work, with the assumption that the DAR will come in to provide support services to the agrarian reform beneficiaries,” he added.
As early as 2001, PEACE saw the need to delve into socio-economic work as a response to new landowners’ need to make their lands sustainably productive. This prompted PEACE to engage in small projects that catered to specific needs of ARB communities.
However, pressure from land-poor communities organized by PEACE has so grown that it realized the need to systematize engagement with government as far as its mandate for provision of support services for the farmers. Likewise, PEACE has decided to upscale its socio-economic intervention, design of which will depend on the Socio-Economic Enterprise Development Conference following the roundtable discussion.