AS election draws near, let us bring Mindanao development closer to the public limelight. It takes some training to develop a critical eye in finding feasible development paths for such a complex setting as Mindanao. There are general principles in the development process of societies; however, there usually are opposing schools of thought that tend to complicate attempts at shedding light on the topic.
Firstly, anyone who wants Mindanao to develop must understand its peoples’ global history. It is global in the sense of minding Mindanao peoples’ interactions with the world from the past to the present. We should drop this bias of interpreting Mindanao only in the context of a post-colonial Philippine nation-state centered in Manila. As a people, we learn from our past, but how do we learn completely if a portion of our history (Mindanao) is absent from our textbooks and schools? The point is not to dwell in the past, but to understand the present to enable us to prepare for the future of Mindanao and our nation.
The multi-ethnic diversity of Mindanao’s places and communities, with their different histories and cultural identities, presupposes the challenge of pursuing development goals in a multicultural society. Mindanao is a place of local communities composed of descendants of Christian settlers, the Moro people or Filipino Muslims, and the indigenous Lumad tribes. There are complexities in using a tri-peoples identification of the Mindanao population. The Filipino Muslims belong to 13 ethnolinguistic groups, which are referred to as Islamized indigenous peoples. The Christians are mostly descendants of settlers from Luzon and Visayas, but there are also descendants of Christianized indigenous peoples in Mindanao. The Christians dominate the economically thriving urban centers. The Moros mostly populate the western and island provinces. The indigenous Lumad population is dispersed all over the island’s largely rural and hard-to-reach areas.
As the world economy expanded in the Twentieth Century, Christian workers and settlers who came to Mindanao, beginning with the American resettlement programs, were inextricably linked to world market demand for wood and timber products, abaca fiber, rubber, mining minerals, and tropical fruits. They were set toward establishing thriving and productive town and city centers, and, consequently, dynamic local economies, with the usual attendant problems of economic growth and development. The internal dynamism of the local economy of Davao was achieved through access and interconnectedness with larger world markets, beginning with abaca plantations.
The Lumad and the Moro peoples in Mindanao, however, were deep into the defense of their independence and way of life while eking out their livelihood, and, in the process, were unsuccessful in setting up thriving production systems linked to local and larger markets abroad. Moreover, the Moro peoples’ local economies are constrained by local conflicts from within (internal strife) and outside (secession). For the Lumad tribes even in Davao region’s early success in development, there remains marginal agriculture production with peripheral population of indigenous peoples that continued to live in the hard-to-reach uplands. Their concurrence with the transition of the Davao agrarian landscape into prospering plantation areas provides contrast with their sluggish economic transformation and marginal economic lives.
The World Bank implicitly espoused that Mindanao’s growth should have been anchored on smallholders’ family farms in agriculture that comprised 60 percent of farms. But instead, Mindanao’s economy in the past was driven by plantation crops, forestry, and mining. Because these were capital-intensive, involved little local processing, and reinvested little profit locally, they had low multiplier effects with few jobs created and did little to reduce poverty. Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small elite group that drove economic and social injustice, enhancing violent conflict in Mindanao.
Rapidly developing Mindanao requires a radical commitment in agricultural modernization through small commercial family farms whose aggregated production feeds into agro-industries serving local and foreign markets. However, there are institutional, human, and capital development requirements for small family farms to increase and modernize production. These are secured land tenure, access to knowledge and technology, farm-to-market roads, farm equipment and inputs, and access to credit markets. Government must determine the progress of these agriculture development requirements by coordinating widespread access through a combination of state-subsidized procurement of farm inputs and farmers’ private procurement in free markets.
The challenge of turning smallholder family farms in Mindanao into viable commercial farms lies in having very few examples of success to emulate, since this was not systematically pursued before. This is true with Moro farmers and Lumad family farms in their ancestral lands. Dominant in the minds of development planners are plantation-sized farms with economies of scale. This leaves out the 60 percent small family farms currently producing below potential, if not at subsistence level.
Mr. Joselito T. Sescon is Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics of Ateneo de Manila University.