To this writing, the contract is the biggest one entered into by the Federation. It is 10 times the size of what we had with the DepEd in 1996 which was in the amount of Php 5M. The size was way beyond our capacity in terms of capital, facilities and logistics. Thus, we asked ourselves, “Can we really deliver the contract?” knowing very well that we had only Php1.5M in our account as against the Php35M working capital requirement. At the end though, we were able to deliver the contract with flying colors. How? This was because of the Federation’s decisive efforts coupled with the support of partners, funding institutions and individuals who generously shared their talents, resources and time and of course, our member cooperatives (MCs) which did their best to deliver their parts of the contract amidst difficulties.
In terms of working capital, this is how the whole thing went. Through the efforts of Mr. Peter Hammerle, CBM provided us an initial fund amounting to almost Php1.3M. This was used in acquiring machines and tools for our new MCs and to partly finance the onset of the contract. We acquired the following loans from different sources for our capital namely; Mr. Hammerle personally lent about Php0.4M to partly finance the performance bond of the contract; the NATCCO central loan funds provided Php2.0M; the Peace and Equity Foundation (PEF) lent Php10M; (the first tranche of the PEF funds enabled us to start the contract); the Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP) released a Php1.0M loan through the Countryside Development Fund (CDF) of Senator Ramon Magsaysay Jr.; the Cataract Foundation of the Philippines (CFP) provided Php2.0M; the Small Business Guarantee and Finance Corporation (SBGFC) released Php8.4M directly to the accounts of five MCs. The Development Bank of the Philippines (DBP) approved a Php10M credit line but only 50% was released to us. The DBP did not release the remaining 50% for reasons we considered unfair. The non-release of said amount greatly affected our work and we almost went bankrupt.