By DIOSA LABISTE
ILOILO CITY—Noel Bejo and his wife decided to start a piggery in their hometown of Banate 48 km from here when they returned from Libya where both of them had worked as nurses.
Thinking it would be their goldmine, Bejo signed up for a contract growing scheme with the Quedan and Rural Credit Guarantee Corp. (Quedancor), which provided a loan, and BIRKS Agri Livestock, the supplier of piglets, feeds and swine medicines. But in less than a year, Bejo’s business suffered.
BIRKS failed to supply on time the feeds for the 60 piglets for fattening, violating the terms of the contract growing agreement. Ten heads died, while the rest grew sickly and wasted during the second cycle of his swine business.
To cut his losses, Bejo disengaged from the project. Today he is still paying the interest of the P150,000, another loan he got from a rural bank to build the pigpens.
Bejo is one of the backyard swine growers in Iloilo who have pulled out of the Quedancor Swine Program (QSP), launched shortly before the May 10, 2004 elections. The failed program has left not only Bejo but other small folks in this province in financial ruin.
Iloilo and nearby provinces make up Region 6, the biggest recipient of loans under the QSP. Under the program’s contract growing scheme, the farmer or swine grower applied for a loan with Quedancor, which released it in the form of hogs, feeds and swine medicines. The borrower may choose to go into hog fattening or raising of sows that would give birth to piglets.
In Region 6, the swine grower was required to get these and other inputs from BIRKS. Marketing the hogs and piglets would also be taken care of by BIRKS’s buy-back agreement, supposedly providing a guaranteed income for the swine grower. BIRKS technicians were to provide technical advice. Marketed as a no-risk scheme, the program had attracted many first-time borrowers.
But BIRKS failed to fulfill its obligations as “input supplier” even if it had already been paid by Quedancor for the supplies, complained Bejo.
The logbook of the Quedancor regional office here details complaints from borrowers like Bejo who either visited or called up Quedancor.
The complaints range from delays in the delivery of feeds from a week to more than a month and failure of technicians to check up the hogs. There were also delays in reimbursements of feeds bought by the swine grower, delays in arrival of semen for the gilts as well as delays in the release of income from the buy-back agreement.
One of the logbook entries was from a grower in Dilaan, Duenas who complained on Nov. 9, 2005 that BIRKS failed to deliver feeds for more than a month. He said he made calls to BIRKS office, but the staff gave all sorts of excuses to avoid talking over the phone.
Letters of complaints also reached Quedancor.
On Oct. 19, 2005, Jonathan Abeja of Batad town wrote that despite repeated calls and text messages to Quedancor and BIRKS, the feeds didn’t come. His piglets showed signs of malnutrition and one died while three more were close to dying.
“I refuse to accept responsibility for this unfortunate development caused by gross negligence (of) BIRKS,” Abeja wrote, adding that the supplier should compensate him for his economic loss.
Elpedio Pama, writing on behalf of his wife, Nieva Jean, told Quedancor district supervisor Jose Antonio Muyuela that the delays of feed supply had affected the sows health, the main reason his business failed.
There also were delays in replacing culled sows, less success in artificial insemination, rebreeding that resulted in low quality piglets and lack of technical assistance—problems he blamed on BIRKS.
Pama has pulled out of the project and insists that BIRKS pay him P30,748 representing the reimbursement for the feeds and proceeds from the sale of his piglets.
On May 26, 2006, Peter Zaldarriaga, another grower, wrote BIRKS president April Dream Teodosio that he is seeking reimbursement for feeds and the release of his buy-back income. He said the delays in supplying the feeds resulted in a 45-day delay in harvesting hogs at his farm.
“It was not our fault if the normal growth of pigs were affected. It is your fault that we did not succeed in raising hogs,” wrote Zaldarriaga.
The growers said they ended up poorer, disappointed with Quedancor and haunted by the loans in their names that BIRKS had assumed but may had not paid somehow.
BIRKS has closed down its office, which was a few steps away from Quedancor regional office along Ortiz Street, Iloilo City. Quedancor officials said BIRKS stopped operations a year ago, its telephone lines cut off and its officials nowhere to be found.
BIRKS’ position was unthinkable in 2004 when the swine program was in full swing.
Aura Dew Escanlar, a nursing graduate who also lost money under the QSP, recalled that BIRKS officials came in their SUVs and their farm technicians in shiny new motorcycles. “With this big company and the tie-up with Quedancor, we thought our business would grow big also,” she said.
At the height of complaints against BIRKS, Teodosio, upon the advice of her lawyer husband, resigned on June 2 as president, only four months in the job. In her resignation letter to BIRKS officials Vicente Cualoping and Mary Ann Ng, she said she was unable to “provide a reliable solution to restore the company from its huge liabilities” despite giving her best effort.
Complaints against the Quedancor and BIRKS forced the local government officials to hold a dialogue between swine raisers and Quedancor officials at the Iloilo Provincial Capitol in late 2006, even if the local government had nothing to do with the swine project.
But an official from the provincial agriculture office said, “Intervention was too late because the problem (had grown) worse.”