Timberland stewardship

I have read some information about getting a 25 year land stewardship on classified timberland for farming purposes from the DENR. Does anyone have any experience or advice on this process? How exactly does it work?

 

Only if you are going to be an employee who is a foreigner. If you are the employer, or business owner, no work visa is needed.

 

A foreigner is only allowed up to 40% business ownership so how would that work?

 

That is incorrect. A foreigner is only allowed to own 40% of a corporation, but can own 100% of an unincorporated business.

 

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&...n0uUXg&sig=AHIEtbS2b7xMn-GwKDR2GpBLe2fhQpsgNg
This is a link to the foreign investment negative list. I think it pretty much covers any business I would be interested in. Note that this applies to investments of less than $2.5 million Dollars. There is no mention that I could see about whether the business is incorporated or not.
Scott

 

A corporation, or even an LLC, is overkill for a small farm owner here. How many farms, percentage wise, do you think are incorporated in the Philippines?

The other thing is traceability? Can you even trace where the fruits or vegetables you consume on a daily basis even come from? Not likely. In order for a farmer to be sued, the consumer would have to know where the produce came from specifically and go through the effort, again, not likely.

As a small farm owner with a farm that grows, harvests, and sells or has sold:

Rice, sugarcane, watermelons, beans, corn, peanuts, cassava, raw lumber, bamboo, squash, coconut, etc. we have NEVER had a problem.

I think most farm owners, along with the buyers of their products, are smart enough to not even try to sell or buy bad, or spoiled produce.

Mega-farms in the Philippines on the other hand are a very different story, and because of the real estate laws here, they are almost always corporations, but not because they are concerned about lawsuits over bad produce.

 

Instead you would rather give away 60% controlling interest from day one? And yes, as a small time farmer here, we have never had a legal problem, and I don't know of any other farmer here who has either. There is no way the end consumer would even know if the produce they were getting was grown by a foreigner or a local, unless they bought it directly from the farm, so why worry about it?

There is no need to be concerned about "bacteria" in some farm raised products either. Sugarcane is one, as it goes from the farm and is heavily processed. A lot of the large farms on Negros grow sugarcane, and sugarcane only.