The Vigan experience

The 1st Cooperatives Tourism Cluster Congress came to a close Saturday night in Vigan City with some 700 delegates and guests swapping ideas about the potentials of tourism and its prospects for cooperatives.

As I mentioned in a previous column, the choice of Vigan City as venue for the first ever Co-op Tourism Congress couldn’t be more fitting because the city’s Spanish village ambience is a top tourist destination.  According to Vigan City Mayor Eva Marie Singson Medina, tourist arrivals are brisk, at more than 500,000 as of 2014.

Vigan has been proclaimed as one of 7 New Wonder Cities of the World, an honor that validates the prestige earlier conferred by UNESCO on the Ilocos Sur capital which is inscribed in the World Heritage List.

The Co-op Tourism Congress is part of the Philippine cooperative centennial celebration initiated by the CDA in collaboration with the sector which for the very first time conducted a summit for co-op tourism.

The brainchild of clustering cooperatives for the purpose of focused group discussions is CDA board Administrator Eulogio “Eloy” Castillo’s, former OIC of the regulatory body.

In the past, CDA would hold yearly summits to address sectoral concerns with agency officials.  According to feedback, the mechanism looked good on paper but the summits actually accomplished very little for the sector, with the exception of the financial cluster which, year in and year out, monopolized the discussions.

The rest of the sector from agri, energy, transport, and other cooperative service providers felt left out and frustrated that the co-op summit became a source of irritation not only for its lack of coherence but also because it became a national junket that made co-ops looked bad.

It was Administrator Eloy Castillo who, during his 7-month stint as OIC, thought of breaking down the summit to different clusters to keep a “laser light” focus on the issues that confront a particular sector.

As with any new ideas, the cluster concept received a lukewarm response except from a co-op leader in Vigan who raised a howl when the program was rolled out.
Nueva Segovia Consortium of Cooperatives CEO Divina Quemi told me that when she found out that co-op tourism sector was not given a specific congress, she expressed dismay to the CDA Board and at once offered to co-host the tourism congress in partnership with the agency.

Ms. Quemi is a tireless co-op leader who also chairs the Regional Cooperative Development Council in Region 1. She is also the newly elected chair of Natcco Network, the largest co-op federation in the country today with more than 1,200 member-primaries.

Judging from the turnout, the 1st tourism congress was a resounding success. Close to 700 delegates representing 216 co-ops and local government units went all the way to Vigan.  This is very significant because getting to northwestern Luzon is already a challenge if you travel from Manila. If one takes off from the central islands or from Mindanao, the prospect of going to Vigan would fade by the hour.

Event organizers actually expected a lean 300 to a maximum of 500, and so topping the target by 50% was quite a feat for CDA Region 1 and NSCC.

The Nueva Segovia Consortium of Cooperatives is probably the only co-op federation that bears the name of the Archdiocese from where it originated.  In the ‘80s, the Archdiocese of Nueva Segovia was led by Bishop now Cardinal Orlando Quevedo who is currently assigned in Davao.

The failure of the Archdiocesan micro-finance program funded by Caritas in the ‘80s prompted then Bishop Quevedo to lean on church-based co-ops which he later unified into a federation.  In his absence, he entrusted the alliance to the Nueva Segovia Caritas staff, Divina Cabucon, now Quemi.

The consortium of 120 primaries spread all over the country operates the NSCC Hotel and Convention Center located in Caoayan, Ilocos Sur, the NSCC Vigan Hotel and the NSCC Bath and Coffee in Vigan.

It also owns a voc-tech school, a distribution facility for agricultural products and offers a comprehensive array of services from lending, microfinance, agro-enterprise and livelihood programs, marketing, insurance, to co-op development training programs.  But clearly, it is in the tourism industry where NSCC has made a mark.

During the Congress plenary, Ms. Quemi revealed the consortium will leverage its co-op influence by building a Grand Hotel costing P150 million. Expected to be completed two years from now, it will cap NSCC’s 25th year.

NSCC may be the new kid on the block among PH co-op federations but its spectacular growth – from P13,500 when it was set up in 1992 to almost P1.4 billion in the current year – makes this former Caritas micro-finance endeavor a must-see co-op business in Vigan.  The co-op itself is a tourist attraction.

This might have been on the minds of Congress delegates who travelled all the way to Ilocos Sur, to see for themselves NSCC, the model co-op in tourism enterprise alongside local tourist attractions in the once trading post founded by Don Juan de Salcedo in 1572.

Everybody looked forward to walk the cobbled streets and discover Calle Crisologo by night, the long and narrow street in the heart of Vigan where time stood still.

Nostalgia embodies Vigan but Congress business was priority for delegates who were all eyes and ears during the plenary. I hope to share the Congress synthesis in a future article.

The Vigan event was the 9th in a series of co-op congresses that began early this year to mark the centenary of the PH co-op movement.  The climax happens in the third week of October in Manila.

If you’re not immersed in the sector, you would think the pace is just too hectic but at the close of the tourism event last Saturday, Divina Quemi exclaimed, “Tapos na ang congress?” (Oh, so we’re done?), as if NSCC and CDA Region 1 still have plenty of surprises in store for Vigan visitors except that they have a plane or bus to catch. (To be continued)