Corporate Gawad Kalinga Villages? Productive, Profitable, Sustainable

MANILA: I have been reading about Gawad Kalinga and the Facebook sharing of "The Chicken Man Louis Faure" and inspired enough to email Tony Meloto, GK Founder, to make an offer he can't refuse, after which I will be known as The Man Who Wrote The Book On GK.

Dreaming. I love it that Gawad Kalinga is helping to build "a future full of hope" (image above from the cover of the GK Annual Report 2015). GK is into national development, one village at a time. "At the heart of development is people," says Tony Meloto. All people. Walang iwanan. "Social Progress is about not leaving anyone behind."

For the Philippines to finally rise from poverty, I'm thinking of even bigger, broader, and beautifuller Gawad Kalinga-like communities. Why GK as model? Because there is order, livelihood, residence, and many benefits of community. People need housing. More than that, they need discipline: The squatters cannot continue squatting, no matter if you call them "informal settlers." People need governance, they need religion. And they need freedom from poverty.

At the end of the GK Annual Report for 2015, it says that Gawad Kalinga is "Building communities to end poverty." A beautiful dream in 5 words; the first 2 are the Mission; the last 3 are the Vision. Clear, concise, coherent and comprehensive. No mistaking what it means; it's short and memorable; it's logical; and it's all-inclusive, as it covers the multitude. The GK people know what the people need.

Notwithstanding, to build communities for them to end their poverty, you will have to make each one of them entrepreneurial. They will have to master what I call the "Love Triangle of Business" and have written about just over a year ago (see my "The Love Triangle of Business. Give me liberty, or give me debts!" 13 December 2014, A Magazine Called Love, blogspot.com). I have another term for them, The 3 Abilities: Product Ability, Profit Ability, and Sustain Ability. Self-explanatory.

From what I have read, some members of the GK communities are productive; their enterprises are profitable; but the communities are not yet self-sustaining in themselves. There is not enough economic activity that keeps on giving.

Gawad Kalinga is on its 15th year, counting from the very first GK villages built outside Bagong Silang (Newborn); it now has 2,500 communities nationwide, which indicates a building rate of an average 167 communities a year. The residents of those new communities are thankful, I'm sure, 100% thankful – but I see that, while commendable and meritorious, building 2,500 communities from scratch in 15 years is much too slow! The poor can't wait.

I'm not poor, but as a GK believer, I can't wait. Personally, I can appreciate the lack of a residence – just yesterday, Tuesday, 15 December 2015, we finally paid in full, P300K, in a 5-year installment, off and on, for a small,100 sqm apartment of 2 bedrooms and 1 washroom and, no, we're not a small family.

Unlike the Montero Sport, what Gawad Kalinga needs is intended acceleration, and for that I would like to propose the concept of a GK Koop, that is, building an all-inclusive (walang-iwanan) cooperative out of every community existing. I'm proposing this as an agriculturist, family man and Vice Chair of the Nagkaisa Multi-Purpose Cooperative in my hometown of Asingan in eastern Pangasinan.

That will be 2,500 coops. Each GK Koop will be radically different from your ordinary coop; the Koop will have a Board of Directors where the many and varied sectors in that community are represented: public, private, state, science, citizens, church, philanthropists, professionals, and peasants from within and from without. All social and economic interests represented, the Board will take care of policy. And the raising of funds.

Building its financial resource from the inside and outside, each GK Koop will provide easy loans for family needs, production inputs, and processing requirements. The marketing of all the products will be exclusively by the coop.

Productive, profitable, sustainable. Like so:

Product Ability –
Let's take the native chicken Darag. You can prepare home-mixed rations for the Darag birds from rice bran, kangkong, banana stems, and madre de cacao leaves (Joselito T Pudadera, UP Visayas, 23 March 2015, businessdiary.com.ph). During the rainy season, make rice bran 50-70% of the feed. During the dry season, fresh rice hull and palay or corn grits will do.

Profit Ability –
"The native chicken (Darag) has the great potential of becoming a big industry," Ricardo A Provido said in 2013 (ANN, 13 July 2013, mixph.com). It's the distinctive taste of the Darag that makes it stand out from the commercial breeds. Even if expensive, the price is right! In Cebu, they are asking P100-120/kilo for the live chickens, more expensive than a dressed Magnolia chicken; "but for broths, soups, long cooking stews, I would take a native chicken any day" – Marketman (marketmanila.com). The Darag stands out from its bland commercially grown cousins with its flavorful meat (Hazel P Villa, 02 October 2015, newsinfo.inquirer.net). It is sought after by local and foreign tourists (PIA, 01 March 2015, panaynewsphilippines.com). If you don't sell the meat, you can sell the bird. Darag breeder Feljean Cagape gets P120 to P180 a head (Nestor P Burgos Jr, 19 December 2008, News Today, thenewstoday.info). He finds that "It is more profitable because it requires less feeds, water and maintenance compared with (exotic) broilers and hogs."

Sustain Ability –
A sustainable business is a green business, an enterprise that has minimal negative impact on the environment (Wikipedia). The native chicken Darag business is such. For instance, there are no steroids and such chemicals given to birds that go into their manure that pollute the soil and nearby waters.

Also, a sustainable business is a continually rewarding business, an enterprise that keeps giving financial rewards. Sustainability is beyond profitability; you can be profitable and yet barely survive.

Why do industrious farmers lead lives of quiet desperation, to borrow from Henry David Thoreau, their existence barely sustainable? One major reason is that they borrow from usurers, unfailingly. The other and bigger reason is that the marketing system deprives them of the reward for honest labor – it dictates the prices, favoring the buyer and disfavoring the seller. This is not sustainable.

The dictatorship of the merchant goes on because the farmers sell their produce individually. That is why I am proposing here that the GK Koop itself become the marketing arm of its farmer members, because it has clout. Instead of seeking middlemen, the Koop itself seeks direct consumers, the bigger the better, such as the Jollibee chain of fast food restaurants. With a contract, the market is assured for the Koop, the supply is assured for Jollibee – a match made in Heaven!

Just imagine not only 2,500 but 25,000 GK community cooperatives all over the Philippines all at the same time building lives full of hope.