Petropolitik, Sapian and China 5

Petropolitik, Sapian and China - Fifth in a Continuing Series

GATT/WTO tends to harness comparative advantage of countries. Our comparative advantage is to supply many of China’s fisheries and agro-industrial needs. Even with the perceived over-population in the urban centers, the Philippines still has wide open spaces and lands waiting to be used for agriculture. Nueva Ecija has some of the vast land reserves and produces some of the largest rice per capita.

I could not describe our vast land resources without remembering Palayan City in Nueva Ecija. After the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, a few thousand Aetas from Zambales have been relocated to a 200-acre strip that was a part of Fort Magsaysay military reservation. The project proponent and our hospitable host, the Fajardo family, was working to secure Cory’s proclamation to release the 200-acre strip from base reservations for aeatas and other poor families to live in and farm. The wife of then Palayan Mayor Rico Fajardo (later, a congressman), Leonora (later, the mayor replacing him), is from Mambusao. Their red-tile roofed white mansion “complex” - complete with a guard house that had a weapons arsenal, a power plant, a 6-room servants bungalow, and a “motor pool” garage - looks over hectares upon hectares of lands planted to rice, coffee and mango as far as the eyes can see. Half of the town was probably their tenants or servants. Despite that, I was amazed how down-to-earth a Mambusaonon Leonora Fajardo is - really nice; and we talked in Bisaya. She told me that Rico owned the defunct F&N Shipping Company; and she, having just arrived from Mambusao at that time, was vending lugaw in a well-attended carinderia near F&N’s gate in North Harbor. Coming to work every morning, Rico noticed the hardworking, business-oriented Tisay, so he started to have lugaw himself. Then they fell in love, got married, and he bought her Tasa de Oro as a gift, a famous American-owned restaurant in Escolta - when Escolta was still the Ayala Avenue. When we stayed in their house, their daughter, Lorelie, was then in high school; now, she is the youngest city mayor in the Philippines. Anyway, led by my former boss Cabinet Secretary Chito Sobrepena (now Metrobank Foundation President), together with then Col. Edgardo Aglipay (later CO/NCRDC and PNP Chief), I supported staff work to get Cory’s proclamation two years later. But even after the 200-hectare strip, Fort Magsaysay military reservation has still several thousand hectares that can be made into a productive agricultural enterprise.

We have most resources, except capital and political will, to organize successful agro-enterprises. The Philippines pioneered hybrid rice in Southeast Asia since the Green Revolution of the 60s. International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Banos, Laguna, which was initially funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and operated under the auspices of the United Nations, produced rice that Thailand, Vietnam and other neighboring countries now profitably export even to us. The University of the Philippines (UPLB), our agro-R&D center, has many developed agro-industrial technologies that are not applied in the field.

Anyway, to Filipinize rice research (e.g., to develop strains requiring less fertilizer, resistant to pests and drought, etc.), we organized our own Philippine Rice Research Institute (PhilRice) in Munoz, Nueva Ecija with multi-million dollar assistance from Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). I was part of Cory’s advance party to inaugurate PhilRice, so we planned a program that included a ground-breaking of a Technology Livelihood Resource Center (TLRC) project, a farmers’ cooperative rice post-harvest facility the size of NFA, in Cabiao, Nueva Ecija. I was the point-person in the Cabiao program - we decided that the stage be built in the middle of a ricefield and Cory’s helicopter would land just behind it. In the eve of Cory’s arrival, we noticed that the field was cracked and dry. So we asked local engineers to build a two-foot wide plywood walkway from the landing area to the stage. Workers worked late and woke up hardware stores in Cabanatuan. There was the walkway the next morning, stronger than the best Parola, Tondo, walkway Nang Novie Pajarillo-Macam, Manila Vice-Mayor Danny Lacuna and I walked on in one of Lacuna’s winning campaign sorties. Then Cory’s chopper and eight other helicopters landed. After the dust cleared, Cory got off, missed the plank by an inch and sprained her left foot. Major Bodet Honrado, Cory’s Aide-de-Camp whose roots is from Sapian, was furious. But we cannot be blamed for it - we did our plank. It was the pilot’s error for failing to get the chopper as close as possible; and the flight engineer neither got the stairs on the plank nor warned Cory about the gap. Anyway, the pained President went on with program, flew to Munoz and inaugurated PhilRice in a wheel chair. Her appointments have been cancelled for the next two days and she had to wear a cast for the next three weeks.