Coop summit centers on solving 2015 ASEAN Integration woes

CEBU, Philippines - The 12th National Cooperative Summit held in Cebu City has taken the challenges of the ASEAN Integration in 2015.

Philippine Cooperative Center Chairperson Doris Cañares said the cooperators are living in a world where socio-economic shifts continue to move at a very fast pace.

“The reality has moved cooperatives to come up with The Blueprint for a Cooperative Decade, a worldwide opportunity for the Philippine cooperative movement to raise bars and set a new benchmark as the countdown on the full implementation of the ASEAN Integration begins,” Cañares said.

The International Cooperative Alliance Blueprint 2020 is a plan to guide the Philippine Coop Sector into strongest growth phase while the PCC 2020 aims to position itself as the unifying and transforming voice of the cooperative movement.

As such, PCC has declared itself as an apex body of the coop sector that may play the role as a counterpart of the government in the development of cooperatives in the country.

The Cooperative Development Authority Vision 2020 is also sending a message that there is a compelling need to re-engineer its organizational structure and to set up a consultative mechanism for national coop policy guidance, to create a national data and information repository and to provide incentive packages to the large coops and the micro, small and medium to merge and consolidate.

In his call of action, National Confederation of Cooperatives Partylist Representative Cresente Paez stressed the need to strengthen the cooperative movement in the light of ASEAN Integration and the need to revolutionize the cooperative system.

Paez said there is also the need to revolutionize the regulatory and developmental system of CDA and the integrated network system of cooperative businesses.

“This is extremely essential if we want our cooperatives to grow and develop at par with Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam,” he said.

Paez cited the “sincere support of the government that has significantly contributed” to the enlargement of the cooperatives in these countries.

But Paez said while coops are tax-exempt for ensuring coop growth, CDA policy on fees for registration, training compliance, inspection, penalties, amendments of authorized capital, and others has been widely criticized as bad economics and therefore, detrimental to cooperative growth.  — (FREEMAN)