Everybody wins in this golfest
What makes poor farmers’ sons leave their farm to seek luck and livelihood away from home?
“They leave because they don’t want to end up like their poor parents,” said lawyer Domingo Duerme, president and chief executive officer of Planters Products Inc., once a giant in the country’s agri-business landscape.
Atty. Duerme was answering his own question. It’s always a no-contest; the agricultural profession loses out whenever the eldest son in a farmer’s family gets to choose a career.
There’s no way to correct the raw reality. However, on Saturday, March 18, Atty. Duerme will host a special 18-hole open tournament. At 6 a.m., the San Isidro de Labrador Scholarship Grant Inc., under PPI, will have its 9th golf tournament at Capitol Hills Golf Club in Old Balara, Quezon City.
“This will be a fund-raising event to finance the education of our farmers’ children who will take up an agricultural course in college and eventually be part of the agricultural profession,” said Francis Joseph Blanca of the PPI Corporate Legal Affairs.
The ninth staging, open to all golfers, will be a little different. This promises to be most massive both in scope and attendance.
For one, Atty. Duerme, as longtime vice president of Philippine Airlines, has successfully hosted the fabled PAL Interclub for over two decades.
It won’t be an ace (of a tournament), but definitely a bogey-free win-win event for everybody who cares for our agriculture industry and the poor farmers.
Atty. Duerme, himself a parbuster, is by the way the same lead executive officer who steered PPI from the grip of gross mismanagement—a boundless sand trap—back into the fairway, the agriculture industry mainstream.
He took over in July with PPI practically penniless, on the verge of bankruptcy.
It was a rough, breathless ride that saw the new PPI president introducing sweeping reforms, correcting mistakes, pin-pointing dubious deals, identifying wrongdoers. He was obsessive but quite compassionate.
Result: PPI rose back and registered profit (P7 million) only five months after the Duerme takeover.
Other than the immediate past president, not a single PPI employee was expelled.
