Nickel Asia Corp. (NAC) reported on Wednesday that its subsidiary Hinatuan Mining Corp. (HMC) suspended operations at its mine site in Tagana-an town, Surigao del Norte province starting October 27 after some employees tested positive for the coronavirus. In a disclosure, the listed nickel miner said the suspension would last until November 10 so it could implement coronavirus precautionary measures to minimize the transmission of the virus. "The potential impact [of the suspension on] NAC's financial results…is not expected to be significant, because HMC is already at the tail-end of its mining season and the last of its ore shipments have been loaded and the rest diverted to NAC's other subsidiaries, Rio Tuba Nickel Mining Corp. and Cagdianao Mining Corp." Nickel Asia said. Hinatuan Mining, it added, continues to implement the necessary measures to contain the transmission of Covid-19 in coordination with relevant local government units and agencies. Nickel Asia shares added 4 centavos or 1.06 percent or 4 centavos to close at P3.81 apiece on Wednesday.
The idea behind consolidating single operators into transport cooperatives is to pool the actual vehicles and their respective routes into practical units for financing upgrades of the jeepneys from the polluting, death-trap eyesores most of them are into modernized versions; and for rationalizing route franchises, removing duplicates, adjusting some routes and adjusting the numbers of vehicles plying routes to make them both financially viable for owner-operators and adequately meeting passenger demand.
To purchase the upgraded vehicles, members of the transport cooperatives, or the cooperatives themselves, can access government loans through Land Bank of the Philippines or the Development Bank of the Philippines. The arrangement at least partly solves one of the biggest complaints of the resisters to the modernization program that the cost of the upgraded jeepneys is too high for owner-operators to bear; the cooperatives can arrange the financing and then provide the vehicles to the owners on terms that may be easier to manage.
According to the DoTr, 1,316 cooperatives have been accredited since the program began in 2017. The economic stress of the coronavirus pandemic has apparently accelerated the uptake of the program: 84 new cooperatives, each with a minimum of 15 members, have been formed since July. In spite of activists noisily championing their "livelihoods," many drivers and operators seem to have concluded that getting on board with the modernization program offers better prospects than standing on Katipunan Avenue all day with a cardboard sign asking for handouts.
Although the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks, jeepney owners are not strictly required to join a cooperative or an "accredited consolidated franchise holder," as it's described by the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB). So long as the independent owner's vehicle passes the computerized Motor Vehicle Inspection Station test for roadworthiness, the LTFRB may issue it a renewable probationary authority, valid for one year, to continue operating.
An example to follow
The PUVMP is, by no means, perfect in execution — for one thing, the process of accrediting a transport cooperative is extremely tedious — but as a concept it is exactly the sort of thing the country should be doing with the "working poor" in several key sectors of the economy. In almost any kind of economic endeavor, efficiency and profitability are functions of scale. There is a hard limit on how much revenue can be generated by a unit of something, whether that is a passenger fare, or a kilogram of rice or fish or coconuts. An individual driver in one jeep or a farmer scratching a crop out of half a hectare of land probably doesn't have the access to resources to build scale on his own, but he can get the same effect by pooling what resources he does have and his output with others.
Advocates for livelihoods, however, have resisted this for the most irrational of reasons: it
is too expensive for the poor driver/farmer/fisherman to upgrade, so his economically unviable and undeveloped small state must be supported. Consolidation into transport or agricultural cooperatives solves the "cost" problem, yet the model is still bitterly contested, for no other apparent reason than a vacuous notion of autonomy — pitching in one's lot with others implies surrender of one's heroic independence. That, of course, is stupid; the fundamental assets of the poor driver or farmer do not leave his hands, but are simply deployed in a more structured and more efficient way.
By constantly barking about livelihoods and resisting any initiative to modernize, the activists who believe they are doing the downtrodden a favor are simply working to keep them in a depressed state. On a larger scale, they are preventing the country's collective assets from being used to their full potential.
Certainly, no one should be exploited or lose their right to make their own choices by any drive for "modernization," and it is the government's duty to ensure that does not happen and that such initiatives are clearly beneficial to their stakeholders. By resisting modernization, however, the defense of livelihoods simply prevents those it presumes to protect from choosing not to be impoverished.
