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Web-only Exclusives
November 30, 2000

From Our Correspondent: Hirohito and the War
A conversation with biographer Herbert Bix

From Our Correspondent: A Rough Road Ahead
Bad news for the Philippines - and some others

From Our Correspondent: Making Enemies
Indonesia needs friends. So why is it picking fights?

Asiaweek Time Asia Now Asiaweek story

INSIDE STORY: PHILIPPINES

Part 2:
THE GOVERNOR'S WAY


MINDANAO IS THE PHILIPPINE frontier. Beginning in the 1900s, the government encouraged people to settle the wild, southern island. The incentive: plenty of fertile land for the taking. Nowhere more so than in the province of Bukidnon, where the climate is particularly inviting and where the governor estimates that some 75% of the population are settlers. The province was the kind of place where people with nothing could become something. It was the kind of place where one family could dominate. In Bukidnon, one family did: the Fortiches.

The patriarch arrived from Spain by shipwreck. His son, made military governor in 1901, came from Cebu to Bukidnon to "pacify the area and establish civilization," says the governor. The family has ruled the province almost ever since. Carlos Fortich, the current governor, has been in power 25 of the past 30 years. Travelers on Bukidon's north-south road pass through Franco Fortich barangay for settlers (named after the governor's great-grandfather), the municipality of Manolo Fortich (named after his grandfather) and Don Carlos town (named after his father). The governor is not a patient man, but development has come slowly to Bukidnon nonetheless. The highway linking the province to the east of the island is half-paved. The capital just became a city. The long-distance phone operator goes home at 6 p.m.

The governor's modest ranch house sits at the end of a dusty private road and is surrounded by several hundred hectares of land he used to farm. Now he raises cattle instead, an easy way to exempt property from reform. He is thought to control another couple of thousand hectares of untitled land throughout the province. (The president's office is supposed to look into this.) His long gray hair is tied in a ponytail, he wears white jeans and a silver eagle belt buckle. And it's Monday. He is a forceful man, unused to being interrupted or corrected. But he doesn't stand on formality: He jumps from the jeep to open the gates on his driveway and carries a thermos of coffee to the office.

In the late 1980s Fortich founded an organization of landowners opposed to the government's agrarian reform program; it is called BALA, which in the local dialect means bullet. He has said to DAR officials: "If you try to take my land, you'll become organic fertilizer." His 1998 campaign platform included a promise to keep the Mapalad farmers off the Quisumbings' land.

The governor doesn't like Manila. He doesn't like the politicking, the compromises and the airconditioning. And he really doesn't appreciate having to answer to a higher authority. "The office of the president can't bully me," he says, as we are served fried eggs, rice and smoked beef for an early breakfast. His fight against the Mapalad farmers is, in his eyes, a fight for autonomy. The governor says he knows how to develop Bukidnon, thank you very much, and it isn't by dividing estates into parcels that he believes can't be farmed efficiently or by distributing land to laborers who he believes can't manage it properly.

"Why give land away to people who can't even feed themselves?" he asks. At least train farmers first. "Everybody will be landowners. But will it solve our economic problems?" The answer, according to the governor and many like him, is no. Land reform is not just a flawed policy, it's a stupid one. Yet reform advocates say there are ways to keep land intact without it being in the hands of a single owner. Farmers often form cooperatives, reform communities or put together processing and marketing agreements to cut costs.

Get real, say the critics. If the government is serious about development, some say, agro-industry is much more promising than small-scale farming. They have a point. Companies pay local taxes and regular salaries. Workers don't have to toil in the sun. But the Mapalad farmers, and many others of their generation, say they aren't sufficiently educated to work in a factory. "We'll help build it," says Rene Penas, the Mapalad cooperative's treasurer. "And then we'll be sent away." If they're lucky. The Quisumbings have promised to hire the farmers (or their children) first, but it is more likely they will be blacklisted not shortlisted.

The Mapalad farmers could receive other land; there is plenty to give away. But for some of the farmers (and all of their supporters) the fight is not just about any land, it is about the promised land. They want the good stuff. The estate is irrigated, on the highway, close to the region's biggest city, Cagayan de Oro. Which may be why the governor is fighting to keep the farmers off the land. Some day, when Cagayan de Oro comes into its own, the estate will be in the suburbs. Manila apparently has plans to build highways linking the area to other growing urban centers. Those 144 hectares will be choice real estate. Property taxes, retail taxes; think what the province can earn. For now, though, it is still prime agricultural land, supposedly safe from development. This is the key issue: which farm land should be protected and who gets to say so?

Part 1: Promised Land | Part 2: The Governor's Way | Part 3: A War of Attrition


This edition's table of contents | Asiaweek home

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