Quedancor Swine Program Another Fertilizer Scam

By Diosa Labiste, Luz Rimban and Yvonne Chua
Vera Files

ILOILO CITY— Aura Drew Escanlar was all set to take the nursing board examinations that December of 2004 when she decided instead to put up a piggery.

What changed her mind was an offer from the Quedan and Rural Credit Guarantee Corp. (Quedancor). Called “the poor man’s financing institution,” the Department of Agriculture’s (DA) credit guarantee arm was giving out loans in the form of piglets and feeds, with a buy-back scheme that assured borrowers some income.

Escanlar then used her parents’ savings to build pigpens and buy piglets, and signed up for the Quedancor Swine Program (QSP). Less than a year later, Escanlar lost almost everything. The income from the buy-back scheme was always delayed, and the feeds came late or were not delivered at all. After 50 of her piglets died, Escanlar stormed the Quedancor regional office here. “You have turned my farm into a graveyard,” she told Quedancor employees.

Escanlar was among the angry borrowers who called up or descended on the Quedancor regional office, their names listed in logbook entries from October to December 2005, many of them financially ruined by the QSP.

The QSP was a dismal failure, said a Quedancor official, because “we lost control of the program.” This also meant losing control over the P3 billion pesos that Quedancor poured into it from 2003 to 2007. The biggest chunk of the money went to Region 6 (Western Visayas), which got more than half of all QSP funds in the first three years of the program alone.

Designed to fail

Where the money went and how it disappeared is being investigated by the Senate and the Office of the Ombudsman. But documents obtained by VERA Files as well as interviews with Quedancor officials, employees and borrowers reveal that the program was designed to fail, through a massive and complicated lending scheme that Quedancor was simply unfit to handle.

Documents and interviews also show that officials involved in Quedancor transactions were the same ones implicated in the P728 million fertilizer scam: then Agriculture Secretary Luis Lorenzo who chaired Quedancor, and then Agriculture Undersecretary for finance and administration Jocelyn “Joc-Joc” Bolante who was at the time also a director of the Land Bank of the Philippines from which Quedancor obtained billions of pesos in loans, a portion of which funded the QSP.

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