The dire present—sugar shortage, bureaucratic lapses and intrigues, flooded classrooms and many more—has brought me back to the shrine of an old book. Written by A. V. H. Hartendorp, the book, though titled, History of the Industry and Trade of the Philippines, carries a more significant subtitle, The Magsaysay Administration.
Nostalgia is the primum movens, the prime mover of my act, of this longing to look at an administration that even up to now is still idealized as the government that could have propelled us to greatness. But we know what happened: a plane crash killed all those dreams and the man.
The author is interesting. Hartendorp was a writer, editor and publisher. He published the Philippine Magazine, which was known before as Philippine Education Magazine, one that was intended for teachers. It would later become one of the most prestigious outlets for writers in the Philippines. Relevant to our memorialization, Hartendorp was one of the Thomasites, a group of educators who arrived in the Philippines on August 21, 1901.
The book on Magsaysay, a thick compendium of economic data, historical references, news and sociopolitical observation, is published by Philippine Education Company.
Mythical now in stature, Magsaysay, through the lens of a Filipinologist (for that was how Hartendorp was later dubbed), does not fail us. His being a Filipino Everyman is addressed in the first chapter with these words: “Magsaysay was also more of a ‘man of the people,’ although he was not of so poor and lowly an origin as he was made out to be by those who directed his election campaign.”
His inaugural speech, said to have been written by Leon Ma. Guerrero, who would later be appointed Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, expressed Magsaysay’s deep convictions. Received with much shouting and jubilations, it was not the speech, however, that became unforgettable on that day. It was his promise made during the campaign that he would open Malacañang to the people and that they could come to see him there at any time. According to the book: “They took him at his word and after the inaugural ceremonies on the Luneta, they followed him there, filling not only the grounds and the corridors but the private quarters as well as the public rooms.”
How did the Magsaysay presidency address the economic concerns of the country? Central to this query is the 1946 Trade Agreement between the Philippines and the United States. The said Trade Agreement was based on the Philippine Trade Act of 1946, “which had extended the period of relatively free trade between the two countries for eight more years,” a period which was to expire on July 3, 1954. According to Hartendorp, “from the following day on sugar, cordage, and other Philippine articles entering the United States were to be subject to duty… while duty-free quotas on cigars, scrap and filler tobacco, coconut oil, and pearl buttons (?) were to be reduced annually by 5 percent of the original absolute duty-free quotas.” The succeeding negotiations were so tough and muddled that what came out at the end depended on who was looking at the documents.
The trade agreement did not, after all, concern itself merely with the economic aspect of the Philippine-US relations; it was about the political underpinnings of the documents, with the nationalists pointing to the agreement as maintaining Philippine dependency on the US than anything else.
One of the points in the book of Hartendorp is his discussion of other developments before and after Magsaysay. Thus, he looks into the data from 1949 to 1957. In terms of tonnages and values of the Philippines’s Ten Principal Exports, these are the interesting numbers: “Copra exports rose fairly regularly from 529,000 metric tons in 1949 to 943,000 metric tons in 1957. Sugar exports increased rapidly during the years 1949-1955 inclusive, then decreased somewhat; the exports amounted to 415,000 metric tons in 1949, and to 712,000 metric tons in 1957.” In enumerating this data, I skipped the monetary value of each export.
Ranked high during the late ’40s and early ’50s as exports were abaca (called Manila hemp), which rose from 63,000 metric tons in 1949 to 116,000 metric tons in 1957, and logs and lumber, which rose from 43,000,000 bd.ft. in 1949 to 855,000,000 bd.ft. Think of the impact of these numbers to our forests. Desiccated coconut, coconut oil, iron ore, chromite ore, copper concentrates, and pineapple juice completed the list of top exports.
What were the chief markets of the Philippines for its top principal exports? The book says, most of the sugar exports went to the United States, which paid about twice the world price for the commodity. How would this compare at present would make for an interesting thesis given the current sugar “shortage.” Most of the coconut oil exports also went to the United States with “almost all” of the desiccated coconuts and “almost all” of the pineapple juice going to the same country.
Are sugar and tobacco related? During the Magsaysay presidency, the two did have a kinship. A tobacco ban imposed by the Philippine government on the US became an issue when the Philippines asked for an increase in the United States sugar quota for the country. But one of the oddities (the word of Hartendorp) in the trade legislation happened during this period—one during the time of Quirino and the other in Magsaysay. These are the Cassava Flour Law and the Law “Prohibiting the Importation of Onions, Potatoes, Garlic, and Cabbages (sic).”
The cassava was to be a source of flour and was to serve as a substitute for wheat flour. Bakers found the suggestion not quite to their standard. As regards the other law, the local producers were unable to supply the demand of the market. How much of this was fueled by nationalism and how much was ruined by capitalism only the present and the future can tell.
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Image credits: Ed Davad