Alter Trade Corporation began as an alternative enterprise promoting the principles of fair trade. However, it is now accused of having further impoverished the lives of farm workers.
BY KARL G. OMBION
Bulatlat
BACOLOD CITY –Alter Trade Corporation (ATC) general manager Norma Mugar, in a letter released to media on Aug. 16, 2006 said, the corporation is an “alternative business enterprise committed to uphold the principles of fair trade and sustainable agriculture; as such, the company places great value to its partners – the farmers and agricultural workers as well as consumers, and its own staff and employees.”
Earlier, in her open letter to ATC’s friends, Mugar stressed that ATC’s profits from its operations are used to provide production assistance to farmers and set up alternative livelihood projects in the communities.
But to guerrilla priest Fr. Frank Fernandez, spokesperson of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) in Negros, Mugar’s description of ATC is the opposite of what it is in reality.
Fake and promoter of unfair trade”
“ATC is a fake and a promoter of unfair trade,” charged Fernandez in a statement sent to media outlets.
“In reality, these hypocrites lead by Edwin Lopez and Norma Mugar are big NGO (non-government organization) bureaucrats, promoters of semi-colonial unfair trade and anti-communist propagandists of the U.S.-Arroyo regime,” Fernandez said.
“Since 1992, the leaders of Alter Trade Corp. had strengthened the politics of the said NGO as a partner of the local reactionary government and foreign capitalists in promoting their reformist programs for the masses; they also made the masses their instruments and milking cows to enrich themselves,” he added.
He also said that the “NGO bureaucrats” of Alter Trade Corp. serve as “middlemen” who dictate cheap buying prices for the peasants’ products that are in turn sold at high prices to foreign consumers in order to amass “huge profit” for their personal and family luxurious interests.
“They are part of the psy-war machinery of the U.S.-Arroyo regime in spreading anti-revolutionary and anti-communist propaganda,” said Fernandez.
ATC defense
Mugar however stressed that ATC was a response to the widespread hunger that gripped Negros Occidental when prices of sugar – the single commodity the province’s economy highly depended on – plummeted in the world market in 1984.
She said that same year, a series of natural calamities also hit the province, the famine worsened.
Due to the sugar crisis, one out of every four workers employed in the haciendas lost their jobs. Starvation spread among the rural population, severely hitting the children.
Mugar clarified that the company was registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) with five original incorporators to engage in both domestic and international trading. It had paid-up capital of P12, 500 ($256.62 at an exchange rate of $1=P48.71). The company borrowed P50, 000 ($1,026.48) from its Japanese partners to start operations. The five original stockholders also became the initial staff. The number of stockholders later expanded to 13.
