‘There is no other job’: the colonial roots of Philippine poverty

Rodino Sawan stepped into the cable harness and dipped his toes into the muddy path that runs through the sweltering plantation. He pushed forward and strained against the load trailing behind him: 25 bunches of freshly harvested bananas, attached to hooks on a conveyor belt.

Six days a week, Mr. Sawan, 55, a father of five, hauls 1,500-pound shipments of fruit to a nearby processing plant, often as planes buzz overhead and pesticides fog. He returns home with back pain and a daily wage of 380 Philippine pesos, or about $6.80.

One day last year, the plantation bosses fired him. The next day they hired him back as a contractor, cutting his salary by 25 percent.

“Now we can hardly afford rice,” Mr. Sawan said. Still, he kept showing up, resigned to the reality that on the island of Mindanao, like much of the rural Philippines, plantation work is often the only work.

“It’s an insult,” he said. “But there is no other job, so what can I do?”

The desperation facing tens of millions of landless Filipinos stems in part from the policies imposed by the powers that controlled the archipelago for centuries — first Spain and then the United States.

In a region characterized by upward mobility through manufacturing, the Philippines stands out as a country still heavily dependent on agriculture – a legacy of outside rule. Nearly 80 years after the country secured independence, the colonial era still shapes the structure of its economy.

Because the United States chose not to engage in large-scale land redistribution, families who cooperated with colonial authorities maintain oligarchic control over the land and dominate the political sphere. Policies aimed at making the country dependent on American manufactured goods have left the Philippines with a much smaller industrial base than many other economies in Asia.

“The U.S. imposed land reforms on a lot of different countries in the region, including Japan, because of World War II,” said Cesi Cruz, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But because they were fighting on the same side in the Philippines, they didn’t want to punish their ally economically by imposing all these restrictions on them.”

Over the past half century, national leaders in much of East and Southeast Asia have pursued a development strategy that has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, attracting foreign investment to build export-oriented industries. Farmers earned higher incomes through factory work, making basic goods such as textiles and clothing before evolving into electronics, computer chips and automobiles.

Yet factory jobs in most Philippines are few and far between, leaving the landless at the mercy of the wealthy families who control the plantations. The industry makes up just 17 percent of the national economy, compared to 26 percent in South Korea, 27 percent in Thailand and 28 percent in China. Data from the World Bank. Even Sri Lanka (20 percent) and Cambodia (18 percent), two of the poorest countries in Asia, have slightly higher shares.

The lack of production and the skewed distribution of land are part of the reason why a country with some of the most fertile land in the world plagued by hunger. It helps explain why roughly a fifth of this country of 117 million people is officially poor, and why nearly two million Filipinos work abroad, from construction sites in the Persian Gulf to ships and hospitals around the world, sending crucial cash flows home .

“You have an export strategy for Filipinos,” said Ronald U. Mendoza, an international development expert at Ateneo University in Manila. “This is really a middle class that we should have had in the country.”

Those who stay home in rural areas typically plant and harvest pineapples, coconuts and bananas, working largely on behalf of the wealthy, powerful families that rule the land.

The plantation where Mr Sawan works is controlled by Lapanday Foods, which exports bananas and pineapples to wealthy countries in Asia and the Middle East. Its founder, Luis F. Lorenzo Sr., was a former governor of Davao del Sur, a province in Mindanao, and a senior executive at Del Monte, the multinational fruit conglomerate. His son Luis P. Lorenzo Jr., better known as Cito, is a former Secretary of Agriculture of the Philippines.

The founder’s eldest daughter, Regina Angela Lorenzo, better known as Rica, oversees Lapanday from a headquarters in the Philippine capital Manila, in a neighborhood full of five-star hotels, glittering restaurants and luxury car dealerships. She described her family as “a bit player” in the agribusiness.

“We employ people,” she says. “We add tax revenue. We are making productive use of the land.”

Her sister Isa Lorenzo owns art galleries in Manila and Lower Manhattan – Silverlens New York, where she exhibits contemporary Southeast Asian artists. A opening exhibition last fall spotlights “environmental, community and development issues,” including the question, “Who owns the land?”

‘Our ancestors are buried there’

Disputes over who owns the land dominate the lives of the Manobo, an indigenous tribe in the highlands of central Mindanao.

For generations, community members lived along the banks of the Pulangi River, under the shade of teak and mahogany trees. They harvested cassava, hunted wild boar and caught fish from the river. They drank from a pristine spring.

“Our ancestors are buried there,” said the head of the community, Rolando Anglao, 49. “That is the land we inherited from them.”

Over therehe indicated, pointing to the other side of a busy highway. The forest was gone. In its place was a pineapple plantation that stretched over almost 3,000 hectares. The land was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by an armed security brigade.

According to Mr. Anglao, the Lorenzo family has seized the tribe’s land. One morning in February 2016, about 50 men arrived in trucks and began firing their guns into the air, causing 1,490 members of the tribe to flee, he said.

Mr Anglao, his wife and their two sons were among 100 families living in shacks built with plastic and corrugated iron along the highway. They drink from shallow wells contaminated with chemical runoff from surrounding plantations, he said. Children are often ill with amoebic dysentery. Tractors drive all day long, blasting air horns, transporting loads of sugar cane and pineapple to processing plants.

Over the years, the tribe has tried to convince local prosecutors to file charges against Pablo Lorenzo III, the president of the local company that controls the plantation, and — not coincidentally — the mayor of the surrounding city of Quezon.

This year, the tribe obtained legal title from the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples, a government body. But the committee has yet to formally record the deed. Mr. Lorenzo has accused the tribe of supporting an insurgency called the New People’s Army, said Ricardo V. Mateo, a lawyer at the commission office in Cagayan de Oro. That has prevented the tribe from reclaiming the land, prompting an investigation by the Philippine military.

In the meantime, the security cordon remains in place, with the trunk on the outside.

“It is the power of Pablo Lorenzo,” said Mr. Anglao. “He is above the law.”

In an interview at Quezon City Hall, Mr. Lorenzo denied seizing the land.

“It’s a scam,” he said. “Those people who say that – they have never even been to that land.”

Still, he acknowledged that he had offered the tribe “a small amount of money” to relinquish its claims.

His family’s wealth goes back to his grandfather, who worked as a corporate lawyer and represented American investors, Mr. Lorenzo said. He personally owns 15 to 20 percent of the company that developed the plantation, he said.

Colonial technology

Americans have not created the inequality that defines the Philippine economy. Spanish authorities allowed Christian missionaries to confiscate land while forcing the native population to make expensive rent payments.

But after the United States conquered the archipelago following a war with Spain in 1898, the colonial administration reinforced unequal control over the soil through trade policies.

Agribusiness companies in the Philippines were given tariff-free access to the US market. In return, American industry secured the right to export manufactured goods to the Philippines without tariffs. Tariffs on other countries kept out products from the rest of the world.

The United States used the Philippines as a laboratory for economic policies that were controversial at home, including pegging the value of the national currency to gold, said Lisandro Claudio, a historian at the University of California, Berkeley. That kept the Philippine peso strong against the dollar, lowering the price of American goods and discouraging the creation of a national industry.

Even after the Philippines gained independence in 1946, this basic arrangement remained in place. The country was decimated by World War II, prompting the United States to provide $620 million in reconstruction aid. But the money was conditional on the Philippines accepting the indignities of the Bell Trade Act, which preserved important aspects of the colonial arrangement.

“The most odious part of that treaty was actually the peso provision,” Mr. Claudio said. “The Philippine government could not fix the price of the peso without Washington’s consent.”

A strong peso has remained a key tenet of Philippine policy ever since, unlike its neighbors. From China to Japan and Thailand, officials have favored weaker currencies to make their products cheaper on the global market, boosting their efforts to industrialize.

Meanwhile, the powerful and wealthy families that control the business community have had no incentive to innovate, unlike surrounding economies where land redistribution has created pressure to take risks and experiment.

“Then you force the next generation to figure out, ‘What can we do to compete?’” says Norman G. Owen, an economic historian at the University of Hong Kong. “But the United States didn’t do that to the Philippines, and the Filipinos didn’t do that to themselves, and here we are.”

‘A hard life’

On a fortunately overcast morning, as low gray clouds obscured the tropical sun, a team of 48 workers pulled weeds from the soil of a Del Monte pineapple plantation in northern Mindanao.

The crew’s leader, Ruel Mulato, 43, was a third-generation plantation worker. His grandfather had worked for an American boss in a job that had changed little in recent decades. Then, as now, people squatted on the ground and used their hands, earning too little to feed their families, forcing many households to borrow from loan sharks.

Mr. Mulato apparently escaped that fate. He had worked as a nursing assistant on the island of Bohol, as a security guard in Manila and as a crane operator in Saudi Arabia.

But when his wife died suddenly in 2011, he moved home to care for his daughter, then just four years old.

He took the job that was available: on the plantation.

He has remarried and has three more children. He hoped they would find more rewarding work.

“This is very hard work,” he said. “It’s a hard life.”