AT LEAST 5,000 Mindanaoan cooperatives representing 1.2 members will gather Thursday in Cagayan de Oro to discuss the role the coop sector will play in helping achieve peace in the troubled island.

Aside from being a major driver of economic growth in the island, it was time for the cooperative sector to take on the larger role of being a “vehicle of peace” and an “instrument of social justice,” said Orlando R. Ravanera, regional director of the Cooperative Development Authority (CDA) in Northern Mindanao.

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Ravanera and the chairpersons of the different Regional Cooperative Development Councils (RCDCs) in Mindanao will present to President Arroyo the “Mindanao Cooperative Peace Declaration.”

The declaration, Ravanera said, “affirms that the cooperative movement in Mindanao is up to the task of peace-building and development.”

Among the issues that they will be raised to Arroyo during the 1st Mindanao Cooperative Peace Forum are the following:

* The creation of Cooperative Human Resource Center in all regions of Mindanao as recognition of the cooperative sector’s human resource to enhance coop workers’ capabilities, develop their potentials and harness their skills

* Preferential use rights to the marginalized sectors—Muslims, Lumads (natives), small farmers and fisherfolk -- in developing their respective of resources

* Rectifying “social wrongs” committed by some utilities providing basic needs like electricity and water against member consumers whose rights of ownership have been “violated” all these years

* Promoting the “Halal” program and making thousand hectares of idle lands productive by planting crops and raising livestock for local consumption and for local and international market.

Ravanera pointed out that in the list of top 100 performing cooperatives in the country, 26 are in Mindanao, contributing 57 percent to the island’s gross domestic product. A 2006 statistics shows that Mindanao’s cooperatives had a total business volume of over P24 billion.

Being an economic powerhouse, Ravanera said cooperatives are in the position to affect change in Mindanao -- and only if their full potentials are unleashed by making them stronger.

Earlier, cooperatives in the region decried what they called “taxation excesses” even as they call for the full application of tax exemptions allowed to cooperatives.

This is one challenge that cooperatives will discuss in Thursday’s forum, Ravanera said.

“We must define cooperativism and not allow other government agencies to do it for us. In the light of the financial crises, taxes are watering down the very purpose of cooperatives,” Ravanera had earlier said in a forum on taxation early this year.