THE crop protection industry--known as CropLife Philippines Inc.?is casting its vote in favor of the embattled banana industry.

For the sake of our action stars in the Senate, CropLife is the association of companies in the pesticide business.

With more than $600 million in yearly export revenue, the banana industry is among the top clients of those firms.

Yet the banana industry is in turmoil. Surely its demise will translate to enormous losses to CropLife members.

Competition from other banana exporting countries (i.e. those in Latin America) is heating up, and a number of them are even subsidized by oil money.

But here, in its 40 years of success in this country, the banana industry does not get a centavo of subsidy from our government. It also does not borrow from banks --both government-owned and private banks.

It?s a thriving industry because of the initiative and hard work of the private sector, period.

Now, word in the industry is that countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Somalia, China and Australia are going full-blast into banana exports.

To top it all, the local banana industry is under attack from pseudo environmental groups that clamor for a government-imposed ban on aerial spraying of fungicide in the banana plantations. What is their reason? Well, they claim aerial spraying is making people in the banana provinces sick, if not killing them.

To belie such claims, CropLife hurled a flurry of letters to the Department of Health, the University of the Philippines and the Fertilizer and Pesticides Authority.

It attacked the supposed ?study? commissioned by the DOH, done by some UP medical doctors, who were supposed to verify the claims made by another doctor.

Says CropLife in one of those letters: ?We have mounting evidence that most of these alleged pesticide-related health cases have actually been fabricated to paint an alarming picture about the ?evils? of aerial spraying.

?That was a big deception.?

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PHILIPPINE Deposit Insurance Corp., or the PDIC, is getting flak from all over supposedly because it is taking its sweet time to pay the deposit insurance claims of the defrauded clients of the infamous Legacy ?banks.?

Wait a minute! The problem here is the Legacy racket, not PDIC! PDIC is the remedy?OK!

Let me rattle off some figures to prove my point. First, the estimated amount of ?deposits??or claimed deposits?in the Legacy fiasco is close to P14 billion.

Legacy happens to have only 12 rural banks. So far this year, 14 other rural banks also closed down. Guess how much was their total insured deposit. Only P2.6 billion!

And then you have the humongous number of accounts in the so-called Legacy ?banks,? which is more than 135,000 as of the last count.

Those 14 other closed rural banks, in comparison, had only 90,000 accounts.

The number of accounts alone means PDIC has to process more than 2,000 boxes of documents related to the Legacy ?banks.?

From what I gathered, PDIC has already validated some 50,000 accounts, representing P2.4 billion worth of insured deposits. These are deposits of less than P15,000?the natural market of rural banks. Meaning, they are ready for payment.

Guess what?only 20,000 of the depositors have filed their insurance claims with PDIC.

PDIC already put some 26,000 accounts as ?doubtful,? meaning they could be part of the Legacy racket involving fictitious loans and such.

Surprise of all surprises?the remaining 60,000 or so accounts represent more than P6.5 billion in deposits!

How did that happen? Look, we are talking here of small rural banks. And those people put hundreds of thousands of pesos in those banks? And yet they are apparently the noisiest group.

Still, I go with the PDIC stance of being careful in paying out the insurance claims of those supposedly Legacy clients.

PDIC even hired two companies for ?forensic audit,? in an attempt to uncover the fraudulent transactions of Legacy ?banks.?

Believe it or not, all these take time.

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VETERAN banker Reynaldo David, picked by the Lola at the Palace to become president of Development Bank of the Philippines, has a heart after all.

David came from Citibank, and in the business community, Citibankers have long been famous for being heartless.

Anyway, I gathered that on a trip to the Middle East one time, David saw some 150 stranded OFWs camping at the residence of the labor attaché. They left their employment for some reasons, and they could not come home due to a thousand and one reasons, such as they do not have the fare money.

Touched by their plight, according to a DBP director, David organized a rescue mission.

He asked the DBP board to allocate a certain amount to bring those OFWs home, and the board responded by taking care of 50 workers.

Next, David told the story to San Miguel Corp. vice chair and COO Ramon Ang, who committed to take care of 50 workers.

The Ayalas? Bank of the Philippine Islands shouldered the expenses of another 10 workers, and the Owwa (the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration) took care of the rest.

And everybody thought that helping those OFWs was precisely the job of Owwa.

Anyway, where were the other banks that made a killing from the remittance business of OFWs? No heart whatsoever?