Building strong co-op leaders
I’ve written before of how we have nearly double the number of farm cooperatives than Thailand has, yet only about a third of our farmers are co-op members, versus almost all (95 percent) in Thailand—a difference that could well explain why Thailand’s agriculture is so much more productive than ours.
We Filipinos take pride in our bayanihan spirit, yet we don’t see it in a proliferation of successful co-ops in the countryside. As National Cooperatives Month draws to a close, let me focus on one thing that has made cooperativism in the Philippines weaker than in nearby countries like Thailand, Taiwan, and South Korea, where co-ops were key to their rapid economic development: leadership. Cooperative Development Authority data show that Filipino co-ops fail mostly due to leadership and governance weaknesses. On this, one might say that the cooperative sector simply mirrors our challenges as a nation. Inequality in the sector likewise reflects the stark inequality in our society: the largest four to five percent of our co-ops control nearly three-quarters of total cooperatives’ assets. The rest are mostly micro-coops with assets not exceeding P3 million. We seem to see co-ops more as safety nets for the poor rather than launching pads for wealth creation. But there is no free lunch. We cannot regulate our way into effective co-ops unless we invest heavily in the human capital running these entities.
I’ve mentioned before a model of how we could do this: South Korea’s leadership training system for the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), to which that country’s economic miracle has been attributed. The bags of cement and steel bars the government gave to villages were not the story. The real engine was the Saemaul Leaders Training Institute—a rigorous, immersive leadership incubator designed to replace a pervasive culture of defeatism (sound familiar?) with the three pillars of diligence, self-help, and cooperation. It’s time for us to establish a Philippine Cooperative Leadership Academy (PCLA) with nationwide reach, patterned after this exact model. If we want our tiny co-ops to scale up to the average size of Thai co-ops, for example, we need to massively overhaul how we train their leaders. Four key elements in South Korea’s system are worth copying.
First, PCLA must set aside dry, theoretical academic lectures in favor of what the Koreans called Bundan Toi—late night highly-charged, case-based group discussions. The curriculum should feature successful Filipino co-op pioneers sharing raw, real-life struggle stories; for example, let our micro-coop leaders debate how an agricultural co-op in Bukidnon bypassed exploitative middlemen to supply major supermarkets directly.
Second, we must integrate, not eliminate. The biggest curse of Philippine governance is our bad habit of reinventing the wheel with every new initiative. We do not lack cooperative training initiatives; we lack synchronization. The PCLA should act as an apex orchestrator, handling high-level strategy and certification of trainers. State universities and colleges could serve as regional residential campuses. Excellent existing networks of accredited training providers and federations like Natcco or MASS-SPECC could be the frontline execution nodes using an upgraded and unified national curriculum.
Third, the Saemaul movement’s dual-leadership system, which mandated electing one male and one female coleader for each community, would serve us well too. In our context, this serves two vital purposes. It ensures that leaders are democratically validated by their peers, and insulates co-ops from being co-opted by local trapos who see them as ready-made voting blocs. It also systematically builds a pipeline of female executives in a sector where women make up the bulk of the workforce but are hardly seen in the boardroom.
Finally, PCLA must adopt South Korea’s formula of social flattening. There, Cabinet ministers, chaebol corporate titans, local officials, and poor farmers wore the exact same green uniform, slept in the same barracks, and ate the same meals. Imagine a training camp where the chief executive officer of a multibillion-peso credit union from Metro Manila shares a room and meals with a struggling seaweed farmer leading a micro-cooperative in Tawi-Tawi. And by requiring Municipal and Provincial Cooperative Development Officers (local government unit [LGU] positions mandated by law) to train alongside grassroots leaders, we could transform LGUs from regulatory roadblocks into active economic partners.
If we can forge a disciplined, unified, and self-reliant cooperative leadership system, thousands of struggling micro-cooperatives can become effective engines of countryside growth. It will need political will, institutional humility, and a collective realization that true economic empowerment requires building the leaders before we can build the economy.
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