Case Digest: Presbitero v. Fernandez – L-19527, March 30, 1963

Property | Immovable Property, Rice Quotas

Art. 415. The following are immovable property:

1. Land, buildings, roads and constructions of all kinds adhered to the soil;
2. Trees, plants, and growing fruits, while they are attached to the land or form an integral part of an immovable;
3. Everything attached to an immovable in a fixed manner, in such a way that it cannot be separated therefrom without breaking the material or deterioration of the object;
4. Statues, reliefs, paintings or other objects for use or ornamentation, placed in buildings or on lands by the owner of the immovable in such a manner that it reveals the intention to attach them permanently to the tenements;
5. Machinery, receptacles, instruments or implements intended by the owner of the tenement for an industry or works which may be carried on in a building or on a piece of land, and which tend directly to meet the needs of the said industry or works;
6. Animal houses, pigeon-houses, beehives, fish ponds or breeding places of similar nature, in case their owner has placed them or preserves them with the intention to have them permanently attached to the land, and forming a permanent part of it; the animals in these places are included;
7. Fertilizer actually used on a piece of land;
8. Mines, quarries, and slag dumps, while the matter thereof forms part of the bed, and waters either running or stagnant;
9. Docks and structures which, though floating, are intended by their nature and object to remain at a fixed place on a river, lake, or coast;
10.  Contracts for public works, and servitudes and other real rights over immovable property. 

Facts: 

• In 1958, a judgment was rendered against Esperidion Presbitero by the Court of Appeals to reconvey certain lots or to pay their value upon failure.
• Attempts for amicable settlement failed.
• The sheriff levied and garnished sugar quotas allotted to plantation adhered to the Ma-ao Mill District and "registered in the name of Esperidion Presbitero as the original plantation-owner", but without presenting for registration copies thereof to the Register of Deeds.
• Presbitero failed to meet his obligations. An auction sale was then scheduled two days before Esperidion Presbitero passed away.
• Special administrator Ricardo Presbitero filed an urgent motion to stop the auction sale on the grounds that the levy on the sugar quotas was invalid because the notice thereof was not registered with the Register of Deeds, as for real property.

Issue: 

• Whether sugar quotas are real (immovable) properties. YES

Held:

In contending that sugar quotas are personal property, the respondent, Helen Caram Nava, invoked the test formulated by Manresa (3 Manresa, 6th Ed. 43), and opined that sugar quotas can be carried from place to place without injury to the land to which they are attached, and are not one of those included in Article 415 of the Civil Code; and not being thus included, they fall under the category of personal properties:

ART. 416. The following are deemed to be personal property:

x x x           x x x           x x x

4. In general, all things which can be transported from place to place without impairment of the real property to which they are fixed.

Wherefore, the parties respectfully pray that the foregoing stipulation of facts be admitted and approved by this Honorable Court, without prejudice to the parties adducing other evidence to prove their case not covered by this stipulation of facts. 

Respondent likewise points to evidence she submitted that sugar quotas are, in fact, transferred apart from the plantations to which they are attached, without impairing, destroying, or diminishing the potentiality of either quota or plantation. She was sustained by the lower court when it stated that "it is a matter of public knowledge and it is universal practice in this province, whose principal industry is sugar, to transfer by sale, lease, or otherwise, sugar quota allocations from one plantation to any other" and that it is "specious to insist that quotas are improvements attaching to one plantation when in truth and in fact they are no longer attached thereto for having been sold or leased away to be used in another plantation". Respondent would add weight to her argument by invoking the role that sugar quotas play in our modern social and economic life, and cites that the Sugar Office does not require any registration with the Register of Deeds for the validity of the sale of these quotas; and, in fact, those here in question were not noted down in the certificate of title of the land to which they pertain; and that Ricardo Presbitero had leased sugar quotas independently of the land. The respondent cites further that the U.S.-Philippine Trade Relations Act, approved by the United States Congress in 1946, limiting the production of unrefined sugar in the Philippines did not allocate the quotas for said unrefined sugar among lands planted to sugarcane but among "the sugar producing mills and plantation OWNERS", and for this reason Section 3 of Executive Order No. 873, issued by Governor General Murphy, authorizes the lifting of sugar allotments from one land to another by means only of notarized deeds.

While respondent's arguments are thought-provoking, they cannot stand against the positive mandate of the pertinent statute. The Sugar Limitation Law (Act 4166, as amended) provides —

SEC. 9. The allotment corresponding to each piece of land under the provisions of this Act shall be deemed to be an improvement attaching to the land entitled thereto ....

and Republic Act No. 1825 similarly provides —

SEC. 4. The production allowance or quotas corresponding to each piece of land under the provisions of this Act shall be deemed to be an improvement attaching to the land entitled thereto ....

And Executive Order No. 873 defines "plantation" as follows:

(a) The term 'plantation' means any specific area of land under sole or undivided ownership to which is attached an allotment of centrifugal sugar.

Thus, under express provisions of law, the sugar quota allocations are accessories to land, and can not have independent existence away from a plantation, although the latter may vary. Indeed, this Court held in the case of Abelarde vs. Lopez, 74 Phil. 344, that even if a contract of sale of haciendas omitted "the right, title, interest, participation, action (and) rent" which the grantors had or might have in relation to the parcels of land sold, the sale would include the quotas, it being provided in Section 9, Act 4166, that the allotment is deemed an improvement attached to the land, and that at the time the contract of sale was signed the land devoted to sugar were practically of no use without the sugar allotment.

As an improvement attached to land, by express provision of law, though not physically so united, the sugar quotas are inseparable therefrom, just like servitudes and other real rights over an immovable. Article 415 of the Civil Code, in enumerating what are immovable properties, names —

10. Contracts for public works, and servitudes and other real rights over immovable property. 

It is by law, therefore, that these properties are immovable or real, Article 416 of the Civil Code being made to apply only when the thing (res) sought to be classified is not included in Article 415.

The fact that the Philippine Trade Act of 1946 (U.S. Public Law 371-79th Congress) allows transfers of sugar quotas does not militate against their immovability. Neither does the fact that the Sugar Quota Office does not require registration of sales of quotas with the Register of Deeds for their validity, nor the fact that allocation of unrefined sugar quotas is not made among lands planted to sugarcane but among "the sugar producing mills and plantation OWNERS", since the lease or sale of quotas are voluntary transactions, the regime of which, is not necessarily identical to involuntary transfers or levies; and there cannot be a sugar plantation owner without land to which the quota is attached; and there can exist no quota without there being first a corresponding plantation.

Since the levy is invalid for non-compliance with law, it is impertinent to discuss the survival or non-survival of claims after the death of the judgment debtor, gauged from the moment of actual levy. Suffice it to state that, as the case presently stands, the writs of execution are not in question, but the levy on the quotas, and, because of its invalidity, the levy amount to no levy at all. Neither is it necessary, or desirable, to pass upon the conscionableness or unconscionableness of the amount produced in the auction sale as compared with the actual value of the quotas inasmuch as the sale must necessarily be also illegal.

As to the remedial issue that the respondents have presented: that certiorari does not lie in this case because the petitioner had a remedy in the lower court to "suspend" the auction sale, but did not avail thereof, it may be stated that the latter's urgent motion of November 4, 1960, a day before the scheduled sale (though unresolved by the court on time), did ask for desistance from holding the sale.

WHEREFORE, the preliminary injunction heretofore granted is hereby made permanent, and the sheriff's certificate of sale of the sugar quotas in question declared null and void. Costs against respondent Nava.