Mariculture in the West Phillippines Sea
Analysis and Opinion
By Juana Pilipinas
Despite being an archipelagic country with one of the world’s longest coastlines (36,289 km) and total territorial water area of 2.2M km, the Philippines (PH) has been suffering from fish shortage. About 60 percent of PH provinces and towns are near the coast and home to approximately 2 million fisherfolk. A sustainable fish source is of utmost importance to PH. An average Filipino gets 50 percent of his/her protein from fish. Fish and seafood consumption among Filipinos has been declining over the years. The highest was 113 grams per person per day (1982), down to its lowest of 94 grams per person daily (2018-2019) because of fish scarcity and high prices at wet markets.
Municipal, commercial and aquaculture fishing yields had been decreasing since the 80’s. There was a constant increase from 2008-2010 and a gradual decline in 2011-2018, creating a shortage necessitating government intervention through importation in 2018, during closed season and whenever the supply cannot meet the demand. For the past few years, a number of Chinese fishing vessels are often spotted swarming waters in Manila, Zambales and Palawan’s exclusive economic zone. Filipinos joke that fish caught in PH waters are brought to China and then offered for sale to the PH government at a premium. About 70 percent of the West Philippine Sea (WPS) fishing grounds are currently overfished. National Task Force West Philippine Sea (NTF-WPS ) stated that approximately 240,000 kilos of fish are taken illegally by Chinese fishermen everyday. Filipino fishermen reported harassment and intimidation while fishing at their old haunts by what appear to be China’s civilian militia often escorted by China’s Coast Guard fleet(s).
For 2024, PH will import 25,000 metric tons of fish particularly round scad, bigeye scad, mackerel, bonito, sardines, and tuna to fill local demand that cannot be supplied domestically during closed season (per FAO (Fisheries Administrative Order) No. 259) which will span from September 1, 2024 to January 30, 2025. All these fish species are readily available at the WPS during open season. Pambansang Lakas ng Kilusang Mamamalakaya ng Pilipinas (PAMALAKAYA) argued that importation is not beneficial to local fishermen especially to the wild capture sector because it pulls down the farm gate price of all marine products.
The PH fish and seafood market crisis stemmed from overfishing, ecosystem damage, unenforced regulation, spotty monitoring and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing activities. Another problem is with poor post harvest practices that approximately 20 to 40 percent of all PH fish produce rot and go to waste. The market also faced the challenges of enhancing domestic production, promoting locally sourced products, and exploring new ways to increase yields to stop importation.
Mariculture refers to the breeding, rearing, and harvesting of aquatic plants and animals in open seas, inshore on theEEZ or offshore on land in tanks and ponds filled with saltwater. Mariculture creates jobs, supports resilient working waterfronts and coastal communities, and provides new international trade opportunities. It can grow to complement wild fisheries to supplement and support fishing livelihoods. Farmed seafood products make up half of the world’s seafood supply, but PH production lags behind much of the world. Doubling current production could result in tens of thousands of jobs in coastal communities. Mariculture could provide a domestic source of economically and environmentally sustainable seafood that will complement and support existing wild fisheries production.
Mariculture is not new to PH. It began in 1930s with oysters, then to mussels culture in 1950s and seaweed farming in the 1970s. It has progressed slowly each decade and had been seriously studied as an alternative to fish production due to the dwindling supply of wild caught fish species and as a preparation to the effects of global warming on the future of capture fishing. The Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources (BFAR) started experimenting with Mariculture Parks in 2011 off the coast of Samal Island, Davao del Norte with three fish cages stocked with milkfish fingerlings. The experiment was deemed a success that more Mariculture Parks were created in different PH seacoasts. Around 40 PH mariculture parks were on the record as of 2009. Eleven of them can be found on the coastal areas facing the WPS. These parks operate much like industrial estates on land, with investors setting up or renting fish cages to grow high-value marine species. Other fish species are also being explored particularly the Filipino staple fish, round scad (galungong), dubbed as the poor man’s fish for its cheap price and year round availability. Attempts to farm round scad in the Philippines by Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) had been ongoing since the first broodstock was collected by researchers in Tigbauan, Iloilo and Hamtic, Antique. They successfully spawned galungong in captivity. They are also involved in mackerel tuna and slipper lobster research for mariculture.
The 11 Mariculture Parks in PH’s WPS
Region I – La Union (2), Ilocos Sur(1), Pangasinan(1)
Region II – Cagayan (1)
Region III – Aurora (1)
Region IV-A – Quezon (2)
MIMAROPA – Romblon (1), Palawan(1), Mindoro Occidental (1)
WPS is very important to PH food security. Around 70 to 80 percent of the galunggong supplied to Metro Manila wet markets are caught in it. It is a migratory path for tuna and has a diverse ecosystem. Multitude of other fish, shellfish and marine plant species had been observed at WPS . World Bank has approved the Philippine Fisheries and Coastal Resilience Project (FISHCORE) loan on May 30, 2023 with a closing date of December 31, 2029. The total project cost is US$ 237.96 million and US$ 176.02 million had been disbursed. This project is poised to benefit millions of fishermen, small and medium-sized enterprenuers, and coastal communities through enhanced fisheries management, fish production growth, and increased incomes to coastal communities’ residents.
Blue Ocean Mariculture( https://bofish.com ) is considered the American gold standard in cutting edge mariculture. It has a certification from Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and lauded for its environmentally sustainable and socially responsible practices. It raises kanpachi , a native Hawaiian amberjack, in deep-sea submersible net pens off the coast of Kona, Hawaii.
Researching and writing this article, I realized that PH already has a mariculture industry. I also found that there are eleven pre-existing mariculture parks in the WPS. Most of these parks though are seeded with milkfish juveniles. In my observation, there is already a local and global glut in the milkfish market. PH needs to diversify its fish species production. It needs to look into producing the fish it is importing (round scad, bigeye scad, mackerel, bonito, sardines, moonfish and tuna) until the domestic supply and demand reach an equilibrium. A diverse, sustainable and environmentally sound mariculture industry in WPS will be a boon for PH. There is nothing wrong with raising high value marine products for export but I believe that PH should aim for food security and self-sufficiency first. There’s a gold mine of available studies that tell us what indigenous marine species thrive in the WPS. More efforts to spawn native fish species in captivity could give rise to a new and improved WPS mariculture industry. The funding is already available so this should be a cakewalk. Or is it?
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Cover Photograph generated by Word Press image maker using the article as a prompt.
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[…] US Marines can provide communications capabilities that can network the islands, making for enforcement sustainable and persistent. But also because squads of US Marines are spread out in these individual islands a better picture of the needs of the populace would be better documented. The company of US Marines tasked in ownership of these islands, will take notes of these needs and they’ll contact Civil Affairs, who will engage with American resources to provide for those needs. There’s US Marine combat engineers, there’s US Navy seabees, there’s even US Air Force civil engineers who deploy just to build stuff. You want a fresh water well here, you want another basketball court there, the sky’s the limit. Or other works that will generate sustainable mariculture as proposed by TSOH Matriarch JP (link: https://joeam.com/2024/08/22/mariculture-in-the-west-phillippines-sea/ ). […]
The Society of Honor by Joe America 
I will share this to the Maritime League Forum.
Excellent, Karl. Thanks. It is a superb review of the issues affecting Filipino fish farming. Kudos to JP.
Kudos to JP
Who’s the most active politician when it comes to this, karl. is it the Pac-man? i remember reading he owned a tuna fishing company.
I went to google to find out where BFAR reports, and it is to Department of Agriculture. This notice came on screen:
“NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC
SUBJECT: PUBLIC CONSULTATION ON THE RULES AND REGULATIONS ON THE OFFICIAL CERTIFICATION SCHEME FOR GOOD AQUACULTURE PRACTICES (GAqP)
This is to inform the public of the upcoming consultation regarding the proposed Fisheries Administrative Order on the Rules and Regulations on the Official Certification for Good Aquaculture Practices (GAqP).
The Face-to-Face (F2F) public consultation shall be held from the 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM on the following cluster schedules:
Stakeholders Cluster Consultation Schedule
Luzon A (Regions CAR, 1, 2 & 3) October 2-3, 2024
Luzon B (Regions NCR, 4A, 4B & 5) October 7-8, 2024
Visayas Cluster (Regions 6, 7 & 8) October 10-11, 2024
Mindanao Cluster (Regions 9, 10, 11, 12, CARAGA) October 15-16, 2024
A copy of the proposed regulation shall be made publicly available at the BFAR Central Office website and BFAR Regional Offices websites no later than September 20, 2024.
For inquiries, you may contact the Inland Fisheries and Aquaculture Division (IFAD) at telephone number (+63) 02 85395665 or email address ifadco@bfar.da.gov.ph.
All interested parties are encouraged to participate in the consultations.”
Prowling around, I found there are 141 licensed fishery establishments. Going through the list illustrates how important fishing is to the Philippines. It’s everywhere, every product imaginable.
Click to access April-30-CY2024-LIST-OF-BFAR-APPROVED-FISHERY-ESTABLISHMENTS.pdf
as to the politician who champions mariculture.
Ralph Recto is one of them.
https://issuances-library.senate.gov.ph/subject/national-mariculture-program
ah, ralph recto must know our country boasts 40 mariculture parks, visayas has highest at 16, mindanaw at 13 and luzon at 11, (stats according to bfar chief malcolm sarmiento).
now that ralph recto is finance chief, he must be thinking of ways and means to maximize tax yields, and then, maybe tax them mariculture parks. at the moment, recto is busy chasing digital service providers like netflix et al with view of charging them 12 percent vat. and mariculture parks will probly have their comeuppance later, unless they come up with very good tax exempt reasons.
BBM and Vilma Santos were the other names with Mariculture legislation
I hope they wont just stop at mariculture legislation, the president specially, and asked for or inquire about updates and reviews from the ground up, and see for themselves how the legislation they have supported is progressing, or dying slowly of a natural death because of inaction and lack of interest. now would be best time for update and review, now that the president is big on food security and pushing for it.
ate vi and the president could really make an impact, they have the throng and the influence to do so. kaso, ate vi seems only interested in old films these days. ahem, I’m going to make a poor imitation of senator cynthia villar and say, makakain nyo ba yan! those old films pwede ba nating kainin yan!
yaong mga magtutuyo (dried fish traders), nora aunor, one of them. surely they’re interested to see how our mariculture hence food security is coming along. it will affect their livelihood sooner or later.
This is important as Food Security is a national Security issue. If a blockade of some form happens we will starve. Also our disadvantage as an archipelago makes this an advantage for us.
I routinely cite the strategic plan that the current DA formulated. Hope this was part of the plan.
that would be nightmare extraordinaire! filipinos starving. already my friends are giving me erap (eye roll). duh, kassie baby, sabi, are you just born today, or you’ve never heard of smugglers! apparently, we have very porous border for smuggler to just come and go and bringing goods and commodities for the black market, i.e onions at prices higher than gold, same with sugar, same with oil, kaso allegedly unregistered tankers carrying smuggled langis went aground at sumadsad off cavite. now what? either we raid those warehouses full with smuggled commodities and kept close eye on our shores.
somehow giancarlo is correct, our archipelagic existence make it easy for anyone to just hop and pop and do their business, like alice guo who just up and away!
great read, JP. i feel the same way about bangus I love it, but theres just way too many bones. especially the fat in the middle. mmmmmm… but aside from bones I’m also really worried about eating microplastics. at least bones if it gets stuck in your throat you can eat a banana and hope it snags on said banana. microplastics accumulates in your nuts (per that most recent study indicating how ubiquitous now). thanks.
Whenever I’m in the area when visting Mindanao, I enjoy walking along the shore of the various large bays facing the Sulu Sea, such as Pagadian Bay in Zamboanga del Sur or the vast coastline of Sibugay Bay in Zamboanga Sibugay. On each occasion, I’ll note the numerous abandoned fish ponds, some built with NGO assistance, some built by overseas family members sending capital back home in hopes of starting a business for their remaining family members. Each abandoned fish pond represents cleared coastal forest, and together a vast mangrove forest that has been long gone for decades. Mangroves provide not only a teeming natural fish nursery, an abundance in shellfish and crustaceans, but also are a seawall against the ravages of typhoons and tropical storms.
One question I have regarding mariculture in the Philippines is what route would be taken? Large scale commercialization which only wealthy corporations can undertake, or training a large number of artisanal family fish farmers by updating the old methods of clearing mangroves for fish ponds to make it more sustainable?
pls check this out, next time you’re in the vicinity. these days mindanaw has a number of mariculture parks for you to visit, peruse and enjoy. that is if you are not squeamish with the smell of brackish water, fish swimming with nowhere to go but the diner plate. and if you think of being eco warrior and saving those imprisoned fishes and releasing them to enjoy life in the wild, pls note that in the wild they’d accosted by marine predators, and may not survive!
https://www.philstar.com/business/2007/08/11/11980/da-establish-195-ha-mariculture-park
I try to stay away from Misamis. I was afraid when a local woman there chased me long ago, and tried to do buyag when I refused haha. I’ll try to check it out whenever I visit CDO again though.
I haven’t yet seen a mariculture park in Mindanao, just the traditional fish ponds that need mangroves to be cut down. The fish ponds that are currently used follow old methods that waste a lot of water, make the pond more and more salty over time until only tilapya can be raised due to tilapya’s toleration of higher than sea concentrations of salt. More likely the ponds will just fall into disrepair and become dry.
I’m not maarte, so getting dirty is fine for me. I regularly walk barefoot in the brackish water, mud, mangroves to catch crab or shellfish when I’m in Mindanao (Western Mindanao). Previously in my youth I engaged in many sports, so I still have that love of physical activities such as diving to collect lobsters or underwater spearfishing by Visayan bangkaw or by western rubber band speargun. I won’t survive underwater as long as a Badjao though!
now that you mention badjao, I have a feeling pastor quiboloy is nagbabadjao-badjawan, haha. he cannot be found coz the entrance to his bolthole is underwater.
kapolisan is right, the pastor is still around.
Quiboloy is so gross. Maybe he really is hiding underwater, with a stick-o between his teeth to breathe haha. He has no where to run if he’s finally brought to justice in the Philippines, because at this point if he travels to any other country he would be subject to the US arrest warrant for tax evasion, child molestation, slavery. The question is “who is hiding Quiboloy?” I wonder if the Duterte operation will face any prosecution for harboring fugitives of the law. They seem very afraid as of days ago.
apparently, the son of god has an underground bunker. kapolisan ought to bring in sniffer dogs and if those dogs stopped at a swimming pool and refused to go any further, kapolisan ought to have closer look at the pool and check the walls for anomalies. there may well be a passage leading to a bunker. ay naku, ginaya yata si saddam hussien who was found hiding in a hole.
pbbm will never go head to head vs old man duterte. methink pbbm is philopater, his father given hero’s burial at libingan courtesy of old man duterte.
instead, pbbm went after ninoy aquino and wanted to change the date of ninoy’s day. the dead is not the problem, the living is, specially the one recently appointed by quiboloy to be administrator of his own kingdom: duterte.
Ha? Really? So Duterte the elder is the designated administrator of KOJC estate? Is that in writing?
here’s the link:
https://www.philstar.com/headlines/2024/03/09/2339252/duterte-named-quiboloy-group-property-administrator
Supposedly the PNP found the general area of the underground bunker today using ground penetrating radar.
Quiboloy appointing Digong to be the KOJC property administrator was probably a Hail Mary tactic right before Quiboloy went into hiding, if I remember correctly. The divine being apparently thought that if Duterte was officially in control on KOJC properties, then BBM and PNP would not dare to conduct a raid. He should’ve secured a pasahe to Mayora Alice Guo’s boat to escape to Indonesia, then follow Guo to HK as apparently is her plan.
I think the police force is closing in on him. It is a tragedy that a person who supposedly personifies a sacred being is involved in the crimes he is accused of. Surrendering and facing the law of the land is what he should had done. All this hiding from the law only makes him look guilty in the eyes of Filipinos. The Dutertes still try to protect him but Ido not think they have the same clout they used to have.
As I always say, Filipino grifter “pastors” have learned well from American “grifter” pastors who originally proselytized in the Philippines. It’s all in the pursuit of money. Can you imagine a Catholic priest having a private jet, helicopter, and a huge compound? The priests I know here share an old donated car, 3 priests sharing one car.
I hope this story will have an ending, and we will be able to find out all the details when Quiboloy sings after the law catches up to him. The Duterte nexus has made a huge mistake since they don’t currently hold the instruments of power, yet they have fooled themselves into thinking they do, with their call for Mindanao secession flopping badly. Once the dust settles, it may be interesting to find out who is funding all this, and where the money is flowing in and out. There might be a shadow connection with China, which is my suspicion.
The fact that many refuse to face is that the Philippines can NEVER go back to the subsistence farming and fishing that worked even up to the 1950s, as the population now is five times that of back then and a threshold was reached.
The only way to cross such Malthusian boundaries is to become more efficient. Agriculture is one aspect and mariculture (not Marites culture, which is already widely practiced) the other.
Food imports to the Philippines must be ridiculously expensive by now. Is that possible?
Both legal food imports and what’s brought in by sea via smuggling are quite expensive. A large percentage of domestically harvested and farmed foodstuffs also rots while waiting for transportation between the islands or during transport. Even food transportation between a single island such as from the bukid in southern/northern Cebu to Metro Cebu suffers losses from lack of refrigerated transport, or equipment malfunction even when refrigerated transport is available. Loss from lack of refrigerated transport is even worse on larger islands like Mindanao.
A wasteful and dire situation that could be fixed with better investment in transportation infrastructure. Food security is national security. Other countries have figured this out in earlier stages of development when those nations were still somewhat poor. Just investing in public transportation infrastructure alone would probably provide many opportunities to accelerate the economy when farmers and fisherfolk are no longer beholden to traditional middlemen who buy their harvests at a low price, and facilitate new industries that can take advantage of the infrastructure to sell products across the Philippines.
ah, that’s when our food inspectors are supposed to be in their most active! they have intel up to their noggins and ought to flex those flaccid muscles and raid those suspect warehouses! raid them smuggled goods, fine them impostors and sell them smuggled good at prices next to nothing! that ought to teach them smugglers a lesson.
I agree with refrigerated transport being sorely needed. not just 2nd hand ones that readily cry for maintenance and break down on the road more often than not, such waste of money, waste of time, and waste of capital.
porbida, we have senators and congressmen and women whose committee oversee transport of goods and perishables. and yet, here we are, already on jeepney modernisation but so far behind on farm modernisation, from farm to plate, perishables rotting before they can be marketed.
truly very ironic indeed, suspect warehouses enjoy refrigeration, well insulated and very well stocked. no wonder npa torched them! and burned them crispier than patas!
Since I like to cook, I cry a little bit inside whenever I visit palengke / tabo in the early morning and the vegetables are already wilted and not fresh. Or maybe that’s because of the Visayan’s natural allergy to “grass” that vegetables are not sold quickly to stay fresh haha.
I suspect more Filipinos will enjoy vegetables if they have access to high quality, fresh vegetables though. When I visit friends in the bukid, they have vegetables in their garden right there. Both my grandfather the government official and my father the soldier said that Filipinos grow vegetables in home gardens, but maybe that was a long time ago. My grandfather’s visits were before Marcos Sr. and my father’s was during and after. I have rarely seen anyone in the city grow even simple common vegetables that don’t need much space like kangkong, talong, kamatis, okra, squash. There’s always a malunggay tree though growing nearby.
Even in a large metro area like Cebu, it’s not that unusual to see smugglers’ small bangka landing on the shore in the morning in Mactan, or even quieter shores along Cebu City and Talisay. The smugglers don’t even try to hide their activities because they know that no one will nab them. They bring all manner of smuggled things: rice, frozen foodstuffs transferred from larger boats, canned goods, secondhand clothes for ukay ukay, small gadgets like phones and tablets. The sea is indeed porous and it seems that the PCG doesn’t have enough patrol ships and sailors to monitor the seas surrounding the archipelago.
What makes me a bit upset about the jeepney modernization is not only that it was botched, but that it was a wasted opportunity to localize production in the Philippines with technology transfer from India, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan. Imagine that a mass produced “Made in Philippines” common vehicle could serve as both a modernized jeep, and with modification a light commercial vehicle for transport. Installing a refrigerated cargo isn’t rocket science, it was already figured out in the 1920s. I am a fan of Japanese kei vans and kei trucks. They’re affordable and are the right size for mass production.
Read and weep. Before and after the pandemic…same same.
https://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/256982-farmers-trash-spoiled-vegetables-urban-poor-hungry-coronavirus-lockdown/
Unimaginable waste, along with lost income for farmers, market stall sellers.
Transportation infrastructure is parallel to food security. Both are vital to national security. What is so dismaying is that each major island somewhat acts as its own economy rather than all provinces as a whole linking up into a national economy. The defeatism prevalent in a large portion of Filipino government that prevents even trying to fix this is infuriating.
Once during one of my extended stays I met a tita in Cotabato who made the best tasting pastil na manok I had ever tasted. A friend wanted to sell that tita’s pastil in Cebu City, so we decided to invest a little. Pastil lasts quite a while without minimal refrigeration, but we never figured out how to send the pastil from Cotabato to Cebu City without it spoiling. The trip needed to go from Cotabato, to Pagadian, to Dapitan, ferry to Dumaguete, another ferry to Southern Cebu, then finally a long truck trip to Cebu City. Sadly we had to abandon the plan when the pastil arrived not so fresh.
Bull’s eye. Plus some fault of neoliberalism
tried freezing pastil? I freeze some of my meals until my relatives raid my freezer. at one stage I thought I share my home with a ‘duwende’ as some noises goes pop in the night and some of my things went missing. the secret cam I installed caught my relatives letting themselves in and helping themselves to my possession.
I freeze cheesecakes, soups and even bread and they last for weeks. once frozen, they are easy to transport, packed in dry ice.
but if you need pastil done fresh on the day, I bet, the same ingredients can be bought locally in cebu, fresh and still quaking from their freshness, you can almost see the chlorophyll still in action.
Pastil doesn’t taste as good if it’s frozen, the texture changes to be a bit where the chicken tastes like canned chicken. We tried transporting the pastil in insulated packaging, but I think even dry ice won’t last the entire trip which would take 3-4 days and the cargo area can often become very hot. Of course there’s pastil too in Cebu but it doesn’t taste as good as the pastil in the Moro areas.
That’s horrible what happened with your relatives. I did notice that a lot with less educated or more poor family members where they will just arrive unannounced, then help themselves to what’s available in the house. If the person whose house they raided the stocks complains, the relatives will become indignant and say that person is selfish. It’s kind of sad actually. Interestingly if someone borrows something from those relatives’ house, the relative will complain loudly or even curse…
This is a post about your comment about dehydrating foods. Home dehydrators are very inexpensive. I have two at home: one for fruits, veggies and mushrooms, and one for meats and seafoods. They are easy to use but they may not be an affordable way to preserve food in PH as they run on electricity. I am sure they can be scaled for commercial purposes to dehydrate large catch of fish and seafoods and also some fruits and veggies in season but it may not be cost effective.
My farm supply store is selling home sized freeze drying machines too. I’ve been eyeing one for a while now. Do you think Filipinos will eat freeze dried fish and seafoods? Or freeze dried anything? I tried some freeze dried “astronaut foods” such as ice cream and chili and I liked them. I know of people freeze drying spaghetti in meatball sauce and other cooked foods. They swear that they taste fresh and delicious after hydration. The pitfall is that the machine also use a lot of electricity.
How about smoking fish and seafoods? It is another way of preserving food that may be within reach of everyday Filipinos. I know I love tinapas in any form and they could last a few days then canned or frozen for longer use.
What is wrong with sun dried food? Are you afraid that they are not sanitary or contaminated?
I am just trying to explore ways of preserving foods to cut wastage. It is sad that a lot of PH harvest on land and offshore are thrown away. There must be a cost effective way to preserve them for food security.
Yes, home dehydrators may be very expensive to own or operate in the Philippines. My concern about natural sun drying is being unable to control the environment in which the food is drying. Even average levels of humidity combined with heat can cause a situation where mold and botulism can take hold. I find it safer to be able to control the drying environment in an electric food dryer (or in an oven on low heat before I bought a dehydrator). For the Philippines with its high humidity, sun drying may not be practical or safe. Many traditional Filipino recipes were formulated in order to fight against “panis,” such as the use of salt, suka, fermentation, drying (in the case of daing).
Personally I like freeze dried food, which I have for emergency supplies or pack with me when I go long distance hiking/camping. I think Filipinos might try out freeze dried food as a novelty, but I’m not sure if that would take off. It would probably be better to fix Philippine transportation infrastructure and food production so that Filipinos can access more affordable fresh food. Almost all places in the Philippines are “food deserts,” which is a big shame. Food deserts contribute to higher rates of preventable disease due to lack of fresh and affordable food.
Smoke cured seafood and meat are delicious! I have a home-made smoker at home that I sometimes cure things in. One of the drawbacks it the large amount of time and the large amount of kahoy needed. Of course here in the US we have access to pellet smokers which are greatly more efficient, but during my travels in remote areas of Mindanao the smokers that people used there are open-air smokers which is very wasteful in terms of fuel consumption. Actually, for those who are too poor and use kahoy as cooking fuel, they usually don’t even have a brick oven/stove. The cooking is done right there on the ground, using a large amount of wood due to waste from heat loss (wind and lack of focusing the heat efficiently).
Actually all this talk of novel methods reminds me of an extended trip I had in Zamboanga Sibugay, the Calamansi Capital of the Philippines. My Catholic group met a calamansi farmer who was open to new methods, because it was hard for him to carry buckets of water for irrigation due to being paralyzed in one arm from an accident. I designed a simple irrigation system using a solar panel, 12V car batteries, DC pump, PVC piping leading to trickle irrigation for each calamansi sapling. That was about a decade ago and the system is still in operation now. Such systems would be even cheaper to implement now. Saving time and labor so the food can get to market more quickly would be a contributing factor to food security too.
Re: Freeze Drying.
At least there is a study.
https://mirdc.dost.gov.ph/transparency/2-uncategorised/32-1-freeze
Karl, I tried to read the research article, but it looks like the PDF is paywalled.
HI, it is not a pdf but you have to scroll down. so many stuff above the article itself
Ah I see it now Karl. I was expecting a research article, but it seems this is an application to DOST for a research grant. Somehow I missed the “Application on going” part. I hope the engineer team is successful in their study because this type of information is very useful.
Have you tried canning? A lot of US farmers, hunters and fishermen especially those in rural areas still “can” food in Mason jars for the winter. They call it “putting up food.” It really helps to can food when they are in season to use during off season and lean days. Canning is a skill that can be learned, and with care and precision, can ward away the dreaded botulism.
Ball is a company that specializes in making jars, lids and utensils suitable for canning. They also publish a book yearly about all you need to know about safe and healthy food preservation with updates of the latest information from food scientists.
It is cheaper to can food than freezing it. The price of electric energy in PH is ridiculous and the other alternatives such as solar and geothermal power have expensive upfront outlay.
https://www.ballmasonjars.com
The downside of canning are salt and preservatives in short processed food. Ready to eat military food are full of preservatives, so long as you survive the battle, the war with the hospital bills can come later,
apparently military food is specifically designed to meet soldiers’ nutritional needs while in combat, compact, long lasting, nutritious and easy to carry.
when not in combat and away from the frontline, soldiers can always eat in the canteen where fresh food is served daily.
battle fatigue and trauma are often the aftermath of battle aside from other health issues. I think veterans hospital is the better equip hospitals around, well staffed and well funded by the government. veterans have subsidized health care, their medical bills ought not be astronomical.
Modern food scientists found a way to can foods with no salt and preservatives added. Here is a useful link about the myths around canned food:
https://www.mealtime.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/10_canned_food_myths_vs_facts_cfa.pdf
Ah, JP, you remind me that my mother was so so special. She’d can tomatoes and green beans, make strawberry jelly, freeze the corn on the cob, and put cucumbers in the brine to pickle. Dad would figure out how to get a cow in the freezer. We ate well during the hard Colorado winters. Geeze I had it good as a kid.
Growing up there was a little old Italian nonna neighbor who “adopted” me as her grandson who taught me all there is to Italian cooking, specifically Sicilian and Tuscan. I still use a modified version of her recipes for pesto, tomato sauce, eggplant which I either can in jars or freeze after each summer. It’s a good use of excess vegetables from my garden.
Dehydrating food is also a good use of the persimmons, apples, jujube, guava that grow on my lot, while the peaches, oranges, kumquat, tangerines get canned. Sometimes if I have extra cucumber, daikon, carrots I’ll pickle those. Tomatoes are also great for lightly roasting then dehydrating (I’m not convinced on the safety of sun-drying), going into marinated olive oil with roasted garlic. Great for gift giving too during the holidays.
Not sure how long it’s been since you’ve been back to Colorado, Joe, but it’s not that bad nowadays. Even the rural areas have reliable electricity now for the most part, while for heating many rural homes have LPG heating.
Colorado is home for me. Great place. The little farm I grew up on is now overrun by Denver, but the mountains are going nowhere. I got my bachelors degree in Ft Collins, and my sisters live outside that terrific city. We had propane and a septic tank as a kid. And horses and steers and an acre of vegetables and strawberries. And sleds and skates and guns and baseball gear and no crime. Good schools. Cars at 16. Beer at 18. My parents gave their kids a great start in life.
Irineo, our dept of trade and industry has e-presyo, an online ap where one can check the prices of goods and commodities at a press of a button.
I think, food imports follow the same rules set up by DTI and has set prices. prices of imported food may change from time to time depending on the season, like christmas where the prices of keso de bola skyrocket so we buy them early and freeze them for use on christmas day and new year.
imported fruits like apples are not that expensive and some are floury, looks good but taste like potato! still, I like local fruits like papaya, pinya, duhat, lanzones, etc.
It is always better to eat local fruits that are in season. Even then, Munich is such a hub of the food trade that one can even get durian from Thailand here, either at the Viktualienmarkt at the center of town (a food market) or if one is a retailer with a pass to a wholesale market there can even be frozen mango. There is a boutique foodstuff place for the really rich with all kinds of ham and cheese but I have not been there in ages as normal life is so expensive nowadays, not that much space for wants anymore.
As the railway bridges for the area of Munich wholesale market are old, foreign truck drivers often forget to read the height limits which are below the standard 4 meters and get stuck..
https://www.sueddeutsche.de/2023/06/09/277c57d8-6765-4bc8-96b2-98b3fff39e46.jpeg?q=60&fm=webp&width=1200&rect=0%2C0%2C1200%2C675
JP
Hope to hear from you
Hi, Karl! Sorry had been MIA because I am trying to help in another cause. It’s election time in the US and a lot is at stake. Trying to do something that can add to others’ efforts to stem the tide of political insanity.
What a relief! I thought something happened to a dear loved one that needs attending. Hope all is well.
Thank you for the concern. I am OK and the loved ones are doing fine albeit another elderly aunt is in the hospital. She has respiratory problem but being well taken care of.
“I’m not a Filipino to say where the Philippines must go, but surely a new national identity can be constructed based on ideals and aspirations, rather than (a constructed) ethnic basis.” I started watching S2 Rings of Power last night. and saw that there were black and brown elves. and I was like elves were supposed to be super white, like whiter than europeans. then I rewatched it looking for black orcs and there were none but there was an orc baby (or maybe half an orc being carried). that was weird too. you don’t have to change Tolkien’s orginal story to retconn it to DEI stuff. you can do a totally separate fan fiction that I think will be wildly successful if you do a completely separate tangent explaining why there aren’t black/brown elves. totally original. build a whole story around that. and thered be a market for it too. my point all this ethnic stuff is cultural based on stories thus can be created and adjusted. remade. i suggest like the black/brown elves idea, make the Filipino identity be based on Aetas/negritos and Badjaos, really get Filipinos to embrace that first, like Native Americans. then build from that. that’ll cover environmentalism and lumad issues. then the richness of creation myths and hero tales will also be a great addition. but start from the bottom up. hunter gatherer culture to modern day stuff.
oooops… wrong thread. sorry.
Did worse..my reply to Joe went to the wrong blog article. Hehehe
LOL. oh man that is worst!
The great thing about fiction is that it can be re-imagined since it’s not based on reality. Perhaps the studio couldn’t find enough White actors lol. By the way, in Tolkien’s mythology, the elves being “pure” meant they were one of the eldest (original) creations of the Ilúvatar. They were the fairest and wisest of the races on Arda. In this context, Tolkien is using the word “fairest” based on the archaic English “fayrest,” which has the meaning of “wise and impartial,” not “white.” Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon language by the way, and most of his constructed languages derived from Old English, Angle, Saxon, Jute words and syntax. It was only later when his book series were developed into the original films that people started associating the elves with being “white people.” I guess that 1800 SAT score back in the day was useful after all, as was the study of Old English and Middle English in high school. A similar thing happened with the Star Wars universe, where old fans woke up their racist beliefs and injected it into the more racially diverse cast of the Star Wars sequels and TV series, since they were used to the classic Star Wars trilogy having the heroes as being “white people.” Presumably in the far future, people no longer had a concept of race and ethnicity, since humankind had been united.
Not sure if a new Filipino identity could be based on Negritos, considering many Filipinos harbor either explicit or implicit racism towards Negrito groups. Badjaos, it’s even worse where a majority looks on them with racial hatred in Mindanao. Negritos and Badjao are also completely different ethnic groups, compared to Filipinos who all descended from the same root Austronesian tribe (except for Ilokanos, IIRC).
Hmm, then I have to revise my idea of SB19 Stell and Justin as elves. Both are fair of skin, but only Justin seems truly pure. Char.
What makes Tolkien great is not only his linguistic sensitivity but also his sense of existing myths that allowed him to build a new but plausible world.
There are several threads of evidence on the different Philippine ethnic groups:
1) the very recent Uppsala haplotype study, which found out that “Igorots” are a population that came before the Austronesians and branched out from the I think Southern Chinese and then crossed the sea. Their features do show it.
1b) the Manobo and the Sama or Badjao came via the southern insular route as per haplotype
1c) the rest are more or less homogenous Austronesians who came by way of Taiwan
1d) not surprised that Bikolanos have the most Negrito blood, based on features – even as there is widespread discrimination of Agta there like not wanting to eat food they prepare. Three out of 15 barangays of my father’s birth town are originally Agta BTW..
2) before haplotype research became as perfect and comprised as today, there was language
2a) Northern Philippine languages like Kapampangan, Ilokano and the tribal Northern tongues are very different from Central Philippine languages like Tagalog, Bikol and Visayan tongues
2b) I have recently heard Tausug (rap in a video) and it doesn’t sound like a Visayan language to me, I wonder who classified it as such. The Southern Philippine languages definitely have Maranao and Maguindanao as well as even AFAIK Manobo, Sama etc in them
2c) as we know, dominant groups can totally erase the language of dominated groups, see how little Celtic languages are de facto still used where the English dominated. Negritos have no more own languages, just disappearing dialects of the Austronesians around them.
2d) there are linguistically based theories that the Ilokanos came from somewhere in what is now Indonesia, much later. Another possibility is conquest like what the Ibalon epic suggests happened when Handyong came to Bikol from “Bhottavara” which could be further South. Well, definitely Ilokano and Kapampangan have a lot of words similar to Bahasa, we don’t know.
3) in the end, does it matter? Ethnogenesis theories write about the following, for instance:
3a) that Vikings and conquered Franks in Normandy decided to be “Normans” at some point
3b) that conquering Normans and conquered Anglo-Saxons decided to be English after a while.
(I kind of suspect that upper class English is a kind of Norman konyo accent that persisted, now I can ask a linguist if that is true. I did read that beef and pork, aka French words for what the rulers ate, Germanic swine and cow for what the peasants had was due to conquest)
It could also be that Stell and Justin receive regular gluta-drips and skin whitening treatment, haha.
At our Catholic preparatory school, my G10 English teacher was a Tolkien obsessive who tortured us for an entire year teaching the class in partial Old English and Middle English rather than Modern English. I thought that old man hated me, but when I graduated high school he gifted me a hardbound set of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Apparently I was his favorite student. I later found out he was a Harvard linguist who took to teaching high school after he retired from academia. His tutelage greatly helped me ace the SAT test later on.
Not to be overlooked in the ethnogenesis of various Philippine ethnic groups is the fact that during the Last Glacial Maximum of the last ice age, vast expanses of the Sunda Shelf and Sahul Shelf were exposed above sea level, creating land bridges that connected many of the Philippine archipelago’s major islands to Borneo that facilitated the movement and mixing of people. The Negrito migrations and Papuan admixture probably originated from this event, while when the sea rose again the ancestors of the Central Philippine Languages were cut off to develop separately. The Cordillerans were one of the last groups to migrate, having originated in the nomadic Tai tribes of the mainland. There are still some littoral Tai tribes inhabiting Hainan, with most having moved inland; the largest population is now the Thai people. The Igorot tribal council form of government is very similar to how mainland Tai groups govern themselves, with the exception to the Thai who were heavily influenced by South Asian government models.
Technically, the Normans descended from a Viking war band who settled after the French king grew tired of being constantly raided by Vikings, so the French proposed to the Norman Vikings that they should settle down in Normandy and raid other Vikings instead. Before the Normans invaded England, Old English was spoken. Old English is closely related to the West Germanic languages of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes that had supplanted the native Celtic, which on the British Isles was previously regulated to Wales, Scotland and Ireland after the continental Western Germanic invasions. During the Norman period, Norman French was the prestige language while Old English evolved into Middle English which carried on the Germanic base of Old English while adding pronunciation from Old Norse (Northern Germanic) of the pre-Norman Scandinavian Viking raiders who decided to settle down in England. Actually, Middle English was the “conyo” of the times as the commoners and non-Normans adapted their Old English into something that sounded more “prestige,” which caused the “Great Vowel Shift” in English. French continued to be the prestige language of the English court until the Hundred Year’s War, after which the English kings and nobility switched to Late Middle English because of the indemnity between England and France resulting from the English loss in the war. It wasn’t cool to be French anymore. Soon after, Early Modern English was accelerated with the introduction of the printing press to England, which standardized the language into a form recognized by modern speakers. Upper class British English (Received Pronunciation) developed from City of London English and the English taught in public schools (British upper class private boys’ schools) and London University, Cambridge University, and Oxford University, whose students usually were from the public schools. Other regional dialects of British English were influenced by the various ethnic groups that had lived in those counties for generations, such as Vikings, Britons, Angles, Saxons, Celts. Scottish English is a unique dialect that has a heavy Gaelic Celtic influence. It is true, however that straightforward vs proper words such as “shit” vs “defecate” originated in the divide between Germanic vs French. For example, “shit” has a root in Old English (Germanic) vs “defecate” having a root in the French déféquer, which in turn is from the Latin defaecare.
Those degrees in English Literature and Linguistics became useful after all, haha.
“In this context, Tolkien is using the word “fairest” based on the archaic English “fayrest,” which has the meaning of “wise and impartial,” not “white.” Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon language by the way, and most of his constructed languages derived from Old English, Angle, Saxon, Jute words and syntax.” oh this is a good point. I’m no LOTR fan, but this Rings of Power looks good actually. even more reason for black and brown to write more about black and brown elves specifically. as to negritos and racism in the Philippines, i agree. dark skinned Mango ave girls were treated badly by their colleagues but would “sell” regularly (i guess that added to the disdain as well). whereas chinese looking girls were popular with locals but not with Europeans/Americans. plus skin whitening products. but if there was say a DepED Higher Education concerted effort of Literature and Anthropology Filipino academics rewrite all the stuff Ireneo has listed and make the focus on negritos and earlier settlers, like LOTR maybe the Philippines can re-adjust its thinking on race and skin color etc. etc.
The second season of RoP is much better, probably because the shakey first season already started out the various plot points so second season doesn’t need to waste time on it.
Filipino version of LotR… well, the Philippines does have a long history of product knockoffs. A Filipino LotR could be titled “Harihari sa Singsing” lol.
Haha, you seem to have so much experience with the Mango Avenue girls LCpl. As for me, I was always running away from such women and their calls of “Hey Joe!” or “Ay gwapo!”
Aside on women, Western men (“afams”) who travel to the Philippines or South America to find women usually have a form of yellow fever, which is a fantasy view of “exotic” women while not respecting or honoring the woman’s culture. They tend to look for women to fulfill their views on how women should act in a relationship (demure, obedient, etc.). Good luck to them with Filipinas who on the outside seem obedient but are definitely mostly maldita. Not to say all foreign men are like that. There are some who have a genuine interest in Filipino culture and want to learn. With the internal dynamics of local Filipino men preferring lighter skinned “blanca” or “chinita,” well, that’s just a legacy of Spanish colonialism. Even now, there are a ton of skin whitening beauty products in the Philippines. What do I know though? Most of my relationships have been with White women.
I consider some very long teleseryes like Ang Probinsyano and Iron Heart as a modern form of Filipino epic.
I have a draft idea of a post-apocalyptic novella where Ilokano Fil-Canadians 3 centuries from now remember “Lam-Ang Probinsyano” as an epic and think a bard named EZ Mil rapped it to the ancestors. I think most our historical memory is that distorted, BTW.
I was also writing a draft of a serial novel of early Bikol loosely based on the Ibalon epic, with Baltog as the first founder of Bikol on Lignon Hill now in Albay (hmm should I give him a a cousin named Barok who founds a town on Sugbu or is that too corny?) and Handyong crashing in Datu Puti like as a datu cast out from Borneo, encountering Oryol (the snake woman of Bikol lore, embodying the feared duality of the Bikolana) who is in fact descended from Baltog and an Agta priestess who eventually becomes his queen like in the epic.
I do have them overcome the first Onos or typhoon like in the epic, but after rebuilding Libmanan (near modern Naga) another onos comes, which Oryol does not survive. Broken, Handyong buries his wife across the Bikol river and names the place Naga, Sanskrit for snake.
The possibility that Rabot the monster old Handyong and his warrior nephew deal with is an armored Spaniard is something I wanted to move some generations after, where the Spanish come and the natives transform the shrine of Oryol into the Lady of Peñafrancia devotion.
I stopped at that point as I thought no, my very Catholic relatives in Bikol will truly hate me..
This would be a pleasure to see on the big screen one day, Irineo.
” I think most our historical memory is that distorted, BTW.” Just add to it, Ireneo. people in the future will focus or forget but then re remember it. I hope you write this and get it off your mind. hell self publish it , just put it out there. don’t worry about readership. I was enjoying my coffee this morning and read about gian’s kid and now I’m stressed out. I think these stories offer reprieve, Ireneo. like gian should write stories too of parenting in the Philippines. get all that what-if out of your head.
Joey, totallly agree. i skipped S1 of Rings of Power like a third thru. don’t wanna back track at all. these 3 episodes i’m really happy with. but i noticed Galadriel put on some weight since S1.
I do eventually publish my stuff, though some of it has a longer incubation as the idea has to grow through drafts and all..
Every major story has, of course, been retold in the context of the time.
Homer’s Iliad and Odysee came out when Greece was challenging mainland powers and expanding westward, even if he certainly took inspiration from existing stories.
The Nibelungen Ring has the medieval and the Wagnerian version but is loosely based on stuff that happened in the Dark Ages. The medieval version was probably trying to show how good it was those days were over, while Wagner was trying to glorify the Germanic past.
Even the story of Rome’s foundation may have some true origins. The Etruscans who preceded Rome may have been of Anatolian origin, some historians say, hence Troy. Twins nursed by a she-wolf may just be the Romans‘ way of saying we are SOBs and bad mofos.
Stories are told and retold not only by Marvel and Disney. Everything has its time and place.
In the Iberian peninsula, Spain and Portugal have a rich history of preserving fish and seafood by cooking and canning them as soon as the are caught. They are super fresh and preserved in oil or different artisanal sauces. Conservas or tinned fish and seafood are often served in these countries in upscale restaurants and tapa bars. There’s a growing trend for conservas in the US. Cool wine bars and artisanal breweries serve them to customers still inside the tin in fancy plates or charcuterie boards. Each gourmet and premium tin can cost 6 to 10 times the price of a steak based on their quality, brand and provenance. PH entrepreneurs might want to look at this trend and capitalize on it. Canning is more cost effective than freezing fish and seafood. Canned fish and seafood also have longer shelf life and easier to transport.
This seems like a good idea JP. I’m not sure which type of fish would be suitable though. It would need to be a fish with natural oily content to keep a good consistency. Flaky fleshed fish like the tunas available in Philippine waters would involve a lot of food waste if the meat is kept intact which commands the highest prices. Perhaps Bali Sardinella (Tamban), Philippine Anchovy (Dilis) or Mackerel (Hasahasa, tanigue) would be good choices? The market for high quality sardines and anchovies in olive oil is always in high demand for gourmet cooking.
I think a serious entrepreneur can look into what will sell locally (and worldwide later) and what is available in PH waters.. Sardines, mackerel, anchovies and tuna are favorites as conservas so are shellfish/mollusks such as cockles, mussels, oysters, clams and shrimps, and cephalopods like squids, octopus and cuttlefish. The diverse species of fish and marine plants in WPS can be studied by home cooks, chefs and food scientists for their canning suitability. Hopefully, in the process, a few will come out as distinctly Filipino products (sardines in coconut oil? oysters in adobo flavor? mackerel in Bicol express sauce? shrimps in sinigang broth?). I know there are a lot of smart, innovative and enterprising Filipinos who are up to the challenge. They are needed to rise to the occasion.
Sounds like good ideas JP. A suitable seafood would need to be identified though, because many common Filipino fishes are quite bony or don’t lend well to preservation besides the various species used for daing (bulad).
Actually a new Seafood City opened nearby in Anaheim so I paid a visit after church over the weekend. I was very impressed with the new layout which reminded me of H-Mart. Very upscale vibes. I was a bit disappointed though about how there was a distinct lack of dry goods or food imported from the Philippines though. Even the bangus was imported from Taiwan from what I saw. There’s probably a huge missed opportunity to create business deals with Filipino supermarket chains like Seafood City where people want to have a “taste of home”, or it could imply that there’s a lack of focus on the export market.
I doubt that Philippine food exporters are very active abroad as, for instance, dried mangoes or mango juice or UFC tamis-anhang banana sauce, not allowed to be called ketchup anymore in Asian stores here in Germany almost always has the sticker of one of the major Dutch Asian food importers. This always was an issue even in colonial times as exporters there only provided whatever the importers in Manila demanded, so there is little real experience of selling and marketing stuff abroad independently, at least as far as I know. Sure, there are TFC and Jolibee abroad now, but those the captive markets of overseas barangays.
I tried some export ventures with Filipino firms in the past, once with a rattan furniture firm and once with a consortium of software firms. In both cases, I got the feeling they just wanted stuff to fall into their lap and quit the ventures as I didn’t want to keep following everything up. There might be exceptions to history, and my experience isn’t the whole picture, but I do have the impression that the path of least resistance is what a lot of Filipino ventures tend to take.
Munich is as I already mentioned a major hub for food importers ever since Bavaria decided to ramp up that business as a still mainly agricultural state starting in the late 19th century. The durian and frozen mango one gets from wholesalers here are all from Thailand AFAIK.
when I visit friend overseas, I always go and visit fililpino stores as well as filipino restos aside from visiting foreign owned local supermarkets. there are filipino products found in international food aisles like dried mangoes, product of the philippines but sold and repackaged under local home brand, same with dried bananas, there is also dole canned pineapples, sweet ube packed in the philippines and carry the original buenas sweet purple yam brand, fried bagoong still in their original glass container from the philippines, same with nata de coco, halo-halo, rice vermicelli in their original clear plastic wraps from the philippines, also the mamasita brand of dry ingredients for home cooks to add to their cooking, like calderita pack, tocino pack, and would you believe it, filipino 2minutes noodles! I am partial to korean 4minutes noodles though.
overseas korean supermarkets supply filipino foods like frozen saba (bananas) though the frozen cassava is from vietnam, frozen suman wrapped in banana leaves from philippines taste wonderful when reheated.
philippines own food products export may not be massive, but it is there alright, we have an international presence.
Sure, we have that here as well on a smaller scale, but at least here the company doing the export and import is never a Filipino firm. Usually, by the sticker, it is a Dutch firm, so probably the Filipino stuff just hitchhikes on container ships that have more Indonesian stuff on them.
Don’t know how it is in other countries, but I can’t imagine a Filipino firm as the main forwarder. Of course, I shall be delighted to hear that at least one exists.
I understand what you mean, Ireneo. Some of our Filipino foods from the Asian Market have the sticker from a California distributor. The small items probably have the distributor’s sticker on the box so the jars of bagoong and halo-halo stuff (macapuno, ube halaya, nata de coco, etc), bottles of condiments (patis, toyo, suka, etc) and cooking mixes ( sinigang, adobo, kare-kare, etc) do not carry individual stickers. Some products are also made in California probably from raw materials from PH or from Fil-Am owned farms and factories.
The US supply chain is usually as follows: from manufacturers to distributors to wholesalers to retailers to consumers. I can see why PH manufacturers sell their products to distributors especially in a foreign country. All they have to do is fill an order, ship it in a container and get paid. The distributor usually have big warehouses to store the products, fleets of trucks and trailers to deliver them, and drivers and warehouse workers as manpower at the point of entry.
JP I wonder if this lack of Filipino-led exports of Filipino products is due to the tendency of Filipino corporations to be happy with just being import businesses to push a consumption mentality among Filipinos. Perhaps it’s easier to keep their status quo where Filipino corporations have a stranglehold on imports, so they can keep the malls (which they also own) humming along.
@Joey, I think it is lack of structure, sophistication, capital, and risk appetite. Cooperatives don’t drive product like big businesses do. Citronella plants are grown on Biliran Island and oils are sent to China to be converted to products that are sold globally. The small scale is replicated in other areas, never coagulating into a meaningful industrial mass.
It’s interesting that capitalist societies originally developed in nations that lack resources, so they were forced to engage in trade to earn. In a nation like the Philippines, the local production is still mostly resource extraction. Similarly the age-old Filipino resentment against Filipino-Chinese for being “better” at business and earning money ignores the fact that most of the original Chinese immigrants whose families now own major Filipino corporations were dirt poor fishermen who came with nothing.
This mentality could probably be combated with education. While it might be a big stretch to adopt a fully Western system, there are lessons to be learned right there in the Philippines right now by emulating Chinoy businessmen. There’s a big importance placed in Chinoy business circles on trust and honor, with unreliable partners being quickly cut out. Chinoys also tend to lend each other capital to start new businesses. Heck, even in recent times Indians are coming over to provide 5-6 utang loans.
There’s a big opportunity for the diaspora to come back to provide capital, implement better economic and business practices, similar to what existed under PNoy’s leadership. This would probably also require more/larger local factories and processing plants to be established… I don’t know, it seems like a big lift in the short term.
I’d argue that the fastest way to ramp up food production and exports is to end the small farm bias and cooperative business framework and let agribusiness go to work. The California Central Valley is marvelous. In parallel, ramp up manufacturing for the jobs they generate. I love Biden’s “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” nomenclature. It captures the good intent of the initiative. Call the Philippine bill “The Food and Job Security Act”, and make sure it lives up to its name. Think and work big.
As a Californian, indeed we do feed the US (and have plenty of excess for export). The Central Valley is an amazing example of how effective land management, water management, and increasingly modernized farming practices can maximize a small area of land’s productivity.
Honestly I don’t see any issue with the small farm + collectives approach, but even as a layman I can clearly see that in the Philippines, it’s being done all wrong. There are many examples of small family owned farms joined by collectives being successful in the ancient past until today in Europe. Switzerland and Netherlands being two prime examples. I think the issue with the approach in the Philippines is the government is very hands off, seemingly uninterested in increasing productivity and how those goods will get to market. There’s also vast areas of idle land even if subtracting the remaining forests (which should be protected). This idle land had previously been farmland, but has fallen into disuse, yet the landowner won’t sell or do anything useful with the land. Sometimes the idle land is rented out to local poor families for subsistence farming.
Biden has been absolutely amazing for righting the economy over here. He didn’t deserve to be knocked down by the media and politicos, but he’ll be remembered for his huge successes that have been vastly understated because he’s not a boastful leader. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act are revolutionary pieces of legislation where Biden effectively corralled, cajoled, or outright hoodwinked members of Congress until they supported the bills. Even the naming is ingenious, since the laws should be actually named “Build Back Better Act” and “Green New Deal,” respectively. Biden made progressivism look normal, and even centrist since he’s an old White dude.
I’ve always believed that if the Philippines wants to get serious about food security and infrastructure, the government needs to do the two in tandem: implement a farm bill that will establish farm loans with the associate agriculturist experts to support it, and develop a better system of national highways on the islands with the inter-archipelago transport being covered by (possibly government owned) standardized ferry/cargo barges. Others often think of America as being so rich. The US didn’t get here overnight… it was due to progressive improvements guided by government subsidy and intervention. By passing transformative law and to let the agency experts in each field work on implementation.
The highway system has gotten a lot of work ever since Aquino. Much wider, faster, and reaching remote areas. Maintenance is a struggle some places. The cooperatives languish because of weak skills and chopped up lands. Rustic, dilapidated, tragic. I doubt that it will ever be a competitive system.
In the late 1990s when I first visited the famous MacArthur Highway in Luzon. I happened upon a mini memorial, the place I can’t recall anymore, but basically the newly built highway depicted in the memorial’s photo was exactly the same as the highway in the 1990s. I showed a picture to my father and he said “Wow, looks the same” as when he last saw the highway in person in the late 1960s-1980s. Fast forward a decade and MacArthur highway was about the same. It wasn’t until President Aquino that I noticed vast highway improvement being implemented, which helped alleviate some portions that allowed for road widening.
On agriculture, isn’t one of the biggest roadblocks to agriculture reform the landowners themselves who refuse to sell, yet refuse to properly utilize their land? They seem to rather let the land sit idle or to rent the land out to tenant farmers. I’ve met a lot of those tenant farmers. Horrible life they face everyday. Often I see landowners holding onto the land hoping that it will be developed into a shopping mall or division… even if the land is in the middle of nowhere.
Yes, that is an issue, but solvable if the price is right, I suspect. In other words, it is not a barrier that would make agribusiness a worse model than cooperatives, in my view.
I see either of two ways for a “Food and Job Security Act” to be implemented. Either the large landowners need to be enticed by favorable loans if they upgrade the productivity of their held agricultural land, or the landowners must be compelled to sell the land at a fair price to the government after which the land will be used properly. The government could always buy out a willing landowner and run a pilot program, bringing in agricultural experts from around the world (US agriculture is world class, we even feed China haha) to develop the pilot and implementation. Once other landowners see how much more money they can make, and that the government will provide favorable loans/support, they hopefully will get on board.
Those are positive steps but how to get there is tough when the land distribution from “ancient” laws is still bogged down. Government is lousy at managing anything. I think just knock down the barriers that protect small farmers and big farms would start to get pieced together under private ownership.
On this topic I think your optimism is greater than mine. From my travels through farmlands it looks like the small farms are disjointed and even if the barriers are knocked down, the collected land probably won’t be contiguous enough to support agricultural land that can feed a nation. Besides, most of the small holders have land that isn’t as fertile as the large landowners whose land is idle from what I’ve seen. I don’t really have faith in landowners suddenly waking up and deciding that they will use the land for productive purposes, it would probably require a government hand guiding such initiatives.
If a government program of mass buying land to start a pilot agriculture modernization program is unpalatable from a land rights perspective, perhaps there are landowners who would be open to voluntarily join a pilot program while holding onto their land rights. There are plenty of medium to “large” landowners, whose family are no longer actively farming yet hold onto the land titles dating back to during the Spanish colonization. Despite “owning” a lot of land these families are typically poor. They might jump at the opportunity to join a government led pilot program. But of course, this would require courage in government to craft relevant legislation, something that seems to be severely lacking.
I don’t think the productivity will come from existing landholders. They will merely get the price they want for their land. The productivity gains will come from agribusiness professionals. SMC or other large companies will start acquiring land and subcontracting out the farming to pros. Businesses will also grow from the bottom up. My confidence comes from recognizing that there is a lot of cash locked up in useless or under-utilized land, and there are professional growers who can unlock it if government takes off the chains. I have zero confidence in any government engagement in production. And you are right, government does not have any ideas about how to unlock productivity. Yours or mine.
A large portion of the problems seem to emanate from the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform law following the Mendiola massacre. If I recall, the laws mandated that no agricultural holding may exceed 5 hectares which is quite small to be sustainable. I read an interesting WaPo article (https://archive.ph/ZbKTb) in which the stated data averaged each agricultural holding at less than 1.5 hectares, which I presume was what most former tenant-farmers and sharecroppers were able to buy from their former haciendera. Not enough to sustain a family on, much less a nation.
I don’t know the full details, but this restriction on agricultural ownership size probably explains why landowners would rather try to keep the land idle hoping to sell the land for commercial development later for the big bucks. The rice basket of the Philippines in the plains of Nueva Ecija have seen gradual then rapid urbanization, with farmland replaced by residential and commercial development. It’s a shame really for a historic province to have its agricultural heritage lost that way. In Cebu I’ve seen numerous piggeries and vegetable farms being slowly let to go idle, later being developed into new housing and commercial spaces, even in places like Boljoon.
I’ve met a few young and very dedicated Filipino agriculturalists. They have new ideas and being a technocratic view on land use. However over time they become disillusioned with the government red tape and Luddite beliefs of farmers. Most eventually left DA and the field altogether.
Gosh! Now I remember. Terrible people.It disappoints me because I got a chance to meet Benny in person.
Ilda, I might have when I visited Benny one time to invite him to my wedding.
I think they got embarrassed by the Philippines living there in the lap of law and order in Australia, so just started piling on. They wanted Gordon to be President, and in retrospect, boy were they poor readers of aptitude.
I called Bennie a hypocrite. That’s what got me blocked.
First I think my reply to you was posted in the wrong blog.
He can not take what he can dish out. I am sure he called a lot if people hypocrites whether directly or indirectly.
One other block that he was proud of broadcasting was when he blocked gabbyd
That is a fair and precise statement of the circumstance.
Sorry Joey, the reply regarding Getrealphilippines was meant for Joe.
I figured as much Karl. No worries, I also share the common disdain for GRP’s benign0 and the others in the anti-Pinoy crowd, haha. Why crap on one’s own country when instead one can be part of the solution? I waded briefly into the anti-Pinoy blogs in the aughts before they unmasked themselves as right-wing crazies. I had my suspicions, which were confirmed when they started attacking President Aquino after they realized they had no influence in that administration. As usual, the far right and far left prove time after time that the horseshoe theory of political ideology is correct. To me they’re chaos agents who have no interest in being part of the solution unless they are fêted as the new overlords of pure thought, while at the same they don’t want to put in the hard work, expecting others to do it for them.
You really are a welcome addition here.
You’ve got enough experience in online and offline affairs
Thank you again Karl. I see myself as a simple observer and believer in optimism.
Last chance if already too late are
Vertical farming and Indoor fish tanks.
Link for aquaculture
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/aquaculture-tanks
Link for Vertical Farming.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/vertical-farming
Karl, check out this article about indoor shrimp farming in the urban heart of Los Angeles: https://www.kcrw.com/news/shows/greater-la/shrimp-downey-nhm/transparentsea-farm
Here’s their company website: https://www.transparentseafarm.com/
They farm Pacific white-leg shrimp (Litopenaeus vannamei aka white shrimp), a species of jumbo prawn I’ve done cast net fishing for in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the most commonly farmed shrimp/prawn species alongside tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon aka giant tiger prawn).
Apparently this company has developed a way to farm white shrimp with increasingly efficient methods, in circular indoor grow tanks with a filtration system that includes beneficial bacteria that neutralizes the shrimp waste, reducing the cost of cleaning the grow tanks. The shrimp are still more expensive than outdoor shrimp ponds in cleared mangroves, but the price has been dropping yearly as the techniques improve input costs. I’ve tasted their farmed shrimp. The texture, firmness and sweetness is exceptional. This is just one example of a small group of entrepreneurs designing a new farming method with the help of marine biologists, and once the idea has been expanded we may see mangroves being protected rather than cleared for fish ponds. Expanding on something like this could be really beneficial in the Philippines.
By the way, I have some experience as a prawn farmer… one of the many life experiences I’ve had. My uncle moved to Texas and I had helped him with his business farming giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii aka ulang in the Philippines). He supplies Asian restaurants across Texas, California, Louisiana. So I can see that the methods that TransparentSea have devised was very similar to the grow ponds that I had helped my uncle build, just indoors rather than outdoors.
As for vertical farming, it could be viable if another agrarian land reform to fix the issues inherent in the 1988 Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law can’t be passed due to pushback from smallholder farmers and contract sharecroppers. Here I’ve also some experience since as a technologist and a home gardener, I’ve set up my garden with an automated irrigation system that runs off of a standard Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer as the controller ($40), PVC piping, solenoid irrigation valves. The fruit trees and regular vegetable garden are uncomplicated as I just need to write a few scripts to control the amount of irrigation needed based on a soil moisture sensor in each section, but the system also controls irrigation to a vertical hydroponics garden that is connected to my koi pond. I also recycle koi fish waste into the irrigation, which helps with cutting down fertilizer usage. I even grow semi-aquatic vegetables such as kangkong and flowers for a dragonfly garden in a portion of the koi pond. There are many bright young engineering minds in the Philippines that could make this happen if they were sponsored with funding. It’s a huge shame that smart STEM students are regulated to the BPO industry after graduation. As to plans, there are plenty of opensource plans shared by the community online, which is what I based my original system diagram on.
Will do. Many thanks
You have worn a lot of hats.
One farming success story.
https://mb.com.ph/2021/9/9/making-a-switch-these-individuals-quit-their-corporate-jobs-to-start-farming
Amazing story. Here in the US there is also a movement of Millennials who have zero agriculture experience “returning to the land,” buying vacant farmland and starting homesteads (small farms) focusing on free range meat products and organic produce. There is a huge market for sustainably grown food in the West. While in the Philippines, just getting the food closer to market would be a success in itself.
The owners of that chili farm probably were able to apply their business training and life experience into making their farm more successful than traditional farming methods. As someone who had done more than a few Catholic relief trips to various places, including bukid in Philippines, I’ve long known that many Filipino farmers are effectively Luddites who don’t know how to change/don’t want to change. A new generation of farmers who apply lessons learned around the world would be a game changer. My grandfather always said “you can learn from your own mistakes, but a smart person learns from the experience of others.” No need to re-invent the wheel, when it’s already been done. Only need to learn the lessons that others have learned.
One talent of Pinoys is mimicking. Unfortunately we are also ningas cogon. Again the jeepney. We start and end with bang but sort fused.
In pop culture, there used to be a huge Filipino fandom for all things Japanese, then it switched to Korean, and now (to my horror) propaganda in the form of media out of China.
Patience and consistency are virtues in themselves though. Malacañang should put you and I in charge of jeepney modernization. We’d formulate a plan and get it done in the allotted time, and bring localized production of modern jeepneys to the Philippines with technology transfer and investment from Japan or Korea while we’re at it. Instead of these POS Chinese “modern jeepneys” I’ve been seeing.
I like that ….me and you in charge of jeepney modernization. Henehe we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we will use Good year or Tokohama.
Or for those with Rich and kind boyfriends they use B.F. Goodrich.
I had a deeper look at jeepney modernization, and I’m appalled that no one in positions of power in the Philippines had the foresight to negotiate for co-production of Japanese, Korean or Indian minibus models. Inq reported this year that even if Japanese models are imported, the cost would be P900-985K vs Chinese models costing P1.8-2.8M. Atrocious! Infuriating even!
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1902947/puv-modernization-filipino-jeepneys-out-china-imports-in
The Japanese are always interested in local re-badging and possibly local co-production, while the Koreans are more than happy to do technology transfer as well as local co-production. With local production, Filipino engineers can start learning how to jump start a domestic auto business while Filipino workers can learn develop high skill manufacturing muscle memory. Blows my mind that the government would set up the jeepney modernization to favor Chinese imports, where the Chinese will keep the production, jobs, and profit to themselves and the Filipinos will only be a import consumer.
To add to the insult, Hino Motors already has a localized business in the Philippines, while Isuzu is partnered with Almazora Philippines and Centro Manufacturing Corporation. There’s also Hyundai’s partnership with Centro. I’m sure Toyota and Mitsubishi would be happy to come on board too if given a chance.
Instead, the Chinese won with over half of the currently approved 54 modern jeepney models and the government is heavily pushing transport groups towards buying Chinese models. Straight import, no Filipino workers involved. Honestly, something is wrong with the brains of these politicians and DOTr officials, or maybe they’re receiving bribes from the PRC.
The view from the left.
https://philippinerevolution.nu/2023/12/21/slaughtering-the-king-of-the-road-a-sacrifice-on-the-altar-of-imperialist-japan/
As usual, the far left makes many complaints yet offer no solutions aside from “the people.” Well, they should know that “the people,” meaning the jeepney owner-operators who are not part of a transport group and the riders deserve real solutions. Not to mention, they conveniently left out the part that in actuality most of the new jeepney sales will go to China and not involve Filipino labor at all, whereas with Japan at least their can be local partnership and technology transfer. I really dislike the CPP.
A far better way to implement the jeepney modernization would’ve been:
1. Identify local manufacturers and investors
2. Identify foreign manufacturers who are willing to invest directly in expanding or building Philippine-based factories and possibly technology transfer
3. Standardize a single model for each PUV class 1-3. Economies of scale make things more affordable. Ford Model T was the first standardized mass produced vehicle and it only had one model, one color
4. Develop and implement an affordable government-backed or public-private loan with favorable (low) interest so that owner-operators can buy the new jeepneys with the installment they can afford
I think this was all doable, but instead Durterte botched the law. Maybe in Davao, BRT-Davao worked out due to being on a smaller scale and having access to foreign slush fund donations from still yet identified sources, but that hair-brained plan would’ve never been able to be expanded nationwide. As usual politicians in the Philippines want to just “pray” things into existence without doing any hard work.
Another one.
https://www.philstar.com/business/2024/08/30/2381495/filipina-agriculturist-recognized-world-food-prize-foundation
On a related note
I got a neighbor who got an award for his biofertilizer and he got international recognition but now that he is old is contemplating on just getting royalties by selling his groups intellectual property to a waste management firm.
I will join him in his two years in the said firm. If all goes according to plan.
My agriculturist friend I’ve mentioned before is affiliated with SEED as well. They are doing good work which is often thankless and unappreciated by smallholder farmers and the LGU heads who are often are run by the farmers collective in the area.
That’s great news about your future venture with your neighbor. Royalties can be a way to go if one doesn’t have the funds or investors to launch the product.
Thanks
I think it is all the factors that Joe mentioned below. A lot of Filipinos are risk averse and fearful of venturing into the unknown. PH has a lot of natural resources that generates plenty of raw materials but turning them into value added products is often not explored. I think some Filipinos just want a quick turnover of what they have into currency that can be spent for their needs and wants. There is often no separation of business capital and personal accounts in small businesses hence the high failure rate. I think some big companies buy the materials from small businesses and manufacture products but they also go for the quick bucks which means selling to distributors instead of managing the full product life cycle.
Turnover so cash is earned is understandable due to family budget needs. One thing that I think holds back many Filipinos is the lack of financial education and budget management. It’s quite rare that I met a Filipino who thinks ahead to save, instead choosing to spend on wants or to give that money to family members who lack. Without saving there is no capital to start even a small business. The defining model of Filipino small-entrepreneurship, the sari-sari store have many cases I’ve observed that started off on utang loans rather than saved capital, and quickly fail. Even my ex’s family, who once owned over 50 tricycles plying the streets in Lapu-Lapu, Cordova, and Mandaue with the accompanying income decided it was better to build a huge house, in the informal settlement they were living in no less where they have no land rights. Well, that house burned down to fireworks along with half the neighborhood over a decade ago, leaving them with nothing. Just a single tricycle left.
Something that really bothers me about the mentality in the Philippines is the frequent unjustified racism and hate towards Chinoys, who for all intents and purposes are fully Filipinized. People with “Chinese” last names are placed on a high pedestal in public life, yet behind their backs people are envious. There is something to be learned about the Chinoy way of doing business that is relationship based, which encourages success in the family and community. The business practices can greatly benefit the Philippines if more people adopt them. These Chinoy families originated from dirt poor fisherfolk who fled mainland China due to poverty.
https://xiaochua.net/2016/02/08/looking-down-on-each-other-the-filipinos-and-the-chinese-a-history-of-racism/ by Dr. Xiao Chua..
Thanks for reintroducing me to this article by Dr. Xiao Chua. He has done a lot of work to try to figure out how to progress a unified national identity. Sometimes I fear that task would be difficult in a country that is subtly balkanized within her own native ethnic groups, much less to Chinese Filipinos.
Re. National Unity and National Identity.
https://qa.philstar.com/nation/2007/11/28/30027/why-national-unity-so-hard-achieve
He thinks national identity is achieved by recognizing all languages as national languages, which is saying that feudal is nationalistic. I think the national language of the global Filipino should be English. The regions can do their own thing. The national language should be English, like in Canada, where French is dominant in parts. You can’t unify by elevating regional languages, but by subsuming them. Subsuming them to Tagalog is saying Manila rules. Oopsie. Not true.
In India, Hindi might be the national language, but the official language English continues to rule with a very peculiar accent and mostly British usage.
But wait, they use English differently in India and the Philippines. Filipinos saying why or how come can mean it as a reproach. Same when Indians say “what is this” in a melodic manner only they can have.
Singlish used in Malaysia and Singapore is a totally different beast.
Indonesia and Malaysia were lucky that the interisland trading language Bahasa survived. Anyone who complains about Tagalogs allegedly dominating the Philippines should check Indonesia – not ONE President who wasn’t Javanese. And an influential Javanese upper class. Though it could also be an advantage that Indonesia has its elitists predating colonial rule and therefore more recognized. Or maybe just more entrenched as we know so little of them. The inside view Joey Nguyen gave us of what happened in Vietnam was fascinating, BTW.
The Philippines will continue to muddle through pretending Filipino is different from Tagalog while the Visayans continue to boycott Tagalog and usually speak excellent English. Smaller languages like Chavacano, it seems, are already dying out. Bikol may yet go the way of Neapolitan in Italy, spoken at home but not in public, as I have seen local radio shows in Bikol conducted in Tagalog. Cebuanos are claiming that their language is THE Visayan language, and in Mindanao, it might already be. Warays and Ilonggos don’t agree, of course. Meanwhile, the dominant media language, aka Taglish, keeps changing and assimilating words from English and other languages, while the Filipino taught in school diverges massively from daily usage. Things are it seems never really finalized there, just allowed to take their own course. Abangan.
Vietnam has had a long history that matches Chinese history, and had largely been forgotten until recently due to the turmoil of the Vietnam War and intervening decades of communist misrule, until the “Doi Moi” plan.
For example, not many know that the ancestors of the Negritos of maritime South and Southeast Asia, including the Aeta and Ati of the Philippines, originated in Vietnam — around Hoa Binh. The Vietnamese people themselves (Kinh people) originated from the Yue states in what’s now Fujian and Guangdong, China to Northern Vietnam. Recent historical and archeological study has identified that civilization had started independently in Vietnam around the same time as it had in ancient China. One of the early Vietnamese states, Nam Viet (Nanyue) controlled the area from Guangdong down to the central coast of modern Vietnam. Later during the Chinese Warring States period, the Vietnamese pulled back due to incursions by the increasingly powerful Han Chinese Empire.
Vietnamese people probably would’ve stayed in Northern Vietnam, the kingdom was happy with trading with neighbors in the Southeast Asia maritime, going as far as Japan and Korea, and the other side to India for trade. Of course there was trade with Indo-Malay states, including the various polities in the pre-colonial Philippines. There are some academic theories that the Japanese learned their swordsmithing skills from Vietnamese traders, which later evolved into the feudal katana and various other Japanese swords. The typical Chinese sword is straight double-edged (jian) versus a Vietnamese sword which is curved single-edged (dao). Ancient Vietnam’s immediate neighbor was the Indo-Malay state of Champa, whose political structure was similar to the pre-colonial Philippine Hinduized polities — led by local chieftains, and an over-chief or paramount chief elected to lead the lesser chieftains in a system called “mandala.”
Vietnam and Champa enjoyed trade for centuries with minimal conflict, compared to attacks from Khmer, Thai, and Burmese states. In fact it was common for the royal houses of both sides to intermarry quite often. Later Cham kings resorted to piracy, raiding north into Vietnam, which was unacceptable to the “civilized” Vietnamese, who began their “march south,” culminating in conquering the Champa capitol (now Saigon). Today the Cham people have almost completely assimilated, with the main difference being that they practice Islam. There are even some famous Vietnamese performers who are of Cham ancestry. Vietnamese is also used commonly as a lingua franca in Cambodia and Laos.
Back to Philippines and languages though. The Cebuanos might have the last laugh on the language question, as from the looks of it they have much larger families than Tagalogs who seem to have peaked in population a decade or two ago. The difference in the use of Cebuano in Mindanao and Leyte compared to two decades ago is stark to me. Even in Panay, where the local Ilonggo have been resistant to the Cebuano incursion, spoken Cebuano has made a prominent foothold.
Bobit Avila has sadly since passed, but he was a great proponent of the Bisaya language. I agree with you Joe, there needs to be a reckoning that there was no historical unity among the various polities that make up the modern Philippines, thus by equalizing all languages won’t help. Even now, Visayan languages are rapidly taking over Mindanao. The more times I visit Zamboanga City, the fewer Chavacanos I encounter. That goes for the other Creole languages as well. The most interesting observation I had is in Zamboanga City, over time Chavacano has been regulated to more and more Chinese-Chavacanos, as native Chavacanos adopted either Bisaya or Tausug. Same goes for Subanen further up the Zamboanga peninsula. Even in the heartland of Waray people, Bisaya had taken a foothold as subsequent generations of Visayan internal immigrants have larger families than the previous Waray population in Leyte.
I would take it either further and adopt an American model where English is not the national language by federal law, but de facto is the national language. This way there would be less friction between this or that group supporting different languages. Everyone would be free to speak their own mother tongue at home or in public. In schools English should be given more focus while the other language should be the local mother tongue. Firmly shifting to the Anglophone world would give the Philippines a huge leg up internationally as well, since English is the de facto global language.
I agree entirely. I also think that is a step too far for government here to take because their nationality is tied to languages, any one of them, as long as it is Filipino. There is no English entity they can conjure up as a nation. It’s foreign. It would probably be easier to get to Mandarin as the “progressive” national language because there are a lot of Chinese here in important positions. There are very few Americans or British Empire denizens here. Just their language.
As far as I know, both Filipino and English are designated national languages under the 1986 Constitution. I’m not a constitutional attorney by any means though. It seems to me that DepEd can implement a program of greater emphasis on English vs Filipino and still be within the bounds of the constitutional mandate, barring any constitutional changes in the future that would explicitly allow or disallow this.
I’ve also never been a politician or government official. However it seems a no brainer to me that to make the Philippines truly competitive unlocking more pathways to personal and national success, the government needs to take proactive measures rather than the typical Philippine hands off and “hope for the best approach.” The other attitude of adopting whatever new shiny things that come along, such as some Filipinos enthusiastically learning Korean, Japanese, and somewhat, Mandarin reminds me of cargo cults discovering a new unknown that seems amazing. Did they know that in Korea, Japan, China business people decisively use English as their common language? I do, I’ve worked in all there of those countries. Considering that China is teetering on the edge of economic collapse due to Xi’s decades of bad policies (nationalism and outward belligerence always go hand-in-hand to cover up domestic discontent and failings), this century will probably be a continuance of Pax Americana not a reborn Pax Sinica… provided that the fascistic elements in the US are finally decisively defeated.
I think there are “buried knowns”. What you say makes perfect sense, but because of laziness, inertia of fear, or self-dealing, the better path is not followed. The logic of it, the advantages for the nation and Filipinos is offset by, “yeah, but it is the language of the colonizer”, or “takes me too far away from my heritage and I’m insecure there.” I agree with you completely. But they can’t get there or it would have been done when Singapore went to English decades ago. Even today, they can see Singapore, say they want to be like Singapore, but speak Tagalog. Complete nonsense.
Singapore occupies a unique space because its citizens recognized that while the “Lion City” was a colony, they moved past that blackholing and defined a new identity for themselves. The Philippines also occupies a strategic position similar to Singapore, but there’s too much infighting and envy of others. When Filipinos stop outward envy and build upon their own merits, of which there are many, is when the Philippines might take off.
I find the Filipino far left to be even more odious than the Western far left. It’s ironic that many of the “colonizer vs oppressed” narratives they adopt had actually originated in the Western schools of Marxist-Leninist thought, so in a sense they adopted yet another colonial mindset. A constant “oppressed” mindset does one no good, and holds a people back. I’ve long advocated for the complete rejection of such ideology and seizing what is in front of one’s self warts and all to build a new future.
Agree on both points.
Hmm, re Filipinos betting on the Pax Americana dying, that was the spirit of Dutertismo, who said America is full of drugs and is weak due to mixed races (yes, he really said that) – echoing PRC propaganda.
But that is all part of the “doon tayo sa malakas, huwag sa mga talunan” supermajority mindset that had Sulayman of Maynila betray his Bruneian in-laws for Spain, and for the Filipino elites to switch to the USA after Spain.
That mindset failed twice recently from 1942-1944 and 2016-2022. People scurried back to the fold of the United States. Anyhow, the mindset of tribal leaders isn’t appropriate for the modern age anymore. Only those who think very shortsighted think it is “wa-is.”
Well, both of our nations had the misfortune of experiencing strongman wannabes in Duterte and Trump. While Dutertismo echoed PRC propaganda, American First echoed Kremlin propaganda. Peas in a pod, I guess. An excruciating time when the world laughed at the Philippines and the US. However, as Biden is fond of saying “never bet against the United States.” America’s strength is in her diversity and ability to meld together differing experiences to produce something new, something that the PRC and Russia can never hope to compete against.
Isn’t there another common saying, “malakas na malakas?” Switching sides in the face of adversity can also be a symptom of national immaturity, like nations in Latin America or Africa that switch sides to whoever “gives them more stuff.” Such short-sightedness is akin to burning down bridges; it would be much more costly to build new bridges rather than maintaining and improving an existing bridge.
It’s a bit incomprehensible some leaders still think in terms of perceived short-term gains being “wais.” Diskarte alone can get someone far in life, as seen in Trump, but eventually a foundation built on BS will collapse as it is for our former President. That sure worked out well for Vargas and Laurel too, and it won’t work out well for Duterte and his allies once there is a reckoning with that administration’s criminal abdication of their duties.
Karl, thanks for sharing this old opinion piece by Bobit Avila.
link to the PDF of the National identity paper.
https://161.49.138.201/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/EPB_pobre_natl-identity.pdf
Thanks for sharing the PDF Karl.
From the timestamp it looks like this paper was written nearly 2 decades ago. Since that time Visayans led by Cebuanos have firmly asserted their language. If anything over this time, other Visayan groups such as Ilonggo, Surigaonons, Butuanon, etc. are adopting Cebuano as a lingua franca within their sphere.
I find that the Filipino nationalism that has been taught in school for decades to be empty and without popular support. Nationalism almost always points back to an earlier period of grandeur, which probably never existed, wherein lies the fallacious nature of nationalism. It’s not my place as I’m not a Filipino to say where the Philippines must go, but surely a new national identity can be constructed based on ideals and aspirations, rather than (a constructed) ethnic basis. National identities that are based on ideals are more easily accepted by disparate groups as common sense of nationhood. The US is so successful in this regard, even more so than the only 3 other nations that were founded on Enlightenment ideals of universal equality rather than blood ties (Canada, Australia, New Zealand).
Another awesome comment from you. i hope the thought leaders who are young enough can take note.
I still hold the same optimism for the Philippines I had felt the first time I visited nearly 3 decades ago. As in the US, the future of the Philippines probably will need to be shaped by the Millennial generation who until now had been boxed out of power by older generations. Generation Z is too chaotic and muddled, too coddled and too easily influenced by online international trends that have nothing to do with the problems facing our own countries. Societies can choose progress and moving into the future… Millennials straddle both the old and the new, the analog and the digital age. I think in the near future they will be a force to be reckoned with in the Philippines as they graduate from the newfound wealth as BPO workers and professionals, and start wondering why they and their families can’t also have the future that’s available in other countries. And they will fight for it.
Dr. Xiao Chua is a millennial, and ever since he got his PhD this year, I have the feeling he is a man on the move with no time to waste, seeing his Facebook.
Indeed, the urgency is real if the Philippines is to be brought on the right path.
Ah, I always presumed Dr. Xiao Chua was a younger GenX. Maybe I’ve aged better than most… haha. He is really doing a lot of good work, with relatable explanations and he’s hooked into the youth culture. I still don’t agree with some of his Romanticized views of Filipino history based on what I’ve read independently, but then again as a layman I’m not a historian so I will respectfully defer to actual historians.
Something tells me that the Philippines powers-that-be considered the BPO generation (dominated by Millennials) was a new way to generate revenue and add to GDP, like prior generations of Boomer and GenX OFWs did abroad. Traditional OFWs were just an engine of remittance economy, having little say in what goes on back home since they’re so far away. However, the fact that BPO workers are increasingly connected to the outside world. They have better gadgets and keep up with trends outside of the Philippines, and have the resources and agency to do something about it. Once these BPO workers mature with families of their own, I think they will start demanding a better Philippines.
Well, his Romanticized view of Philippine history is what my father taught him.
But he does differ in three aspects:
1) the willingness to speak to those who don’t want to use Filipino/Tagalog.
2) tackling contemporary history, which most Filipino historians won’t touch. Good because that history is more relevant to today, and he therefore has many points of intersection with MLQ3, especially his vlogs on The Republic.
3) Recently, he gave a quick overview of how the Filipino came to be for FilAms, and he said Austronesians with maritime culture who experienced the same colonial rule. That’s a more modern view of history than the Romantic one.
The Romantic view of history can’t explain why Canada and USA, or Austria and Germany, are separate nations. The idea that a nation is usually more a group of people with a similar fate is more realistic than the idea that they are something holy that comes out of a people. Herder said “God’s Breath” or similar, and that is superstition, as Joe would rightly say. Canadians are just those who were too slow to get the memo of leaving the British King. Joke lang. Bavaria isn’t part of Austria because they kinda parted ways in 1705/6, in spite of very similar culture.
Karl didn’t quite like the idea of nations as “bahala na gangs” when I mentioned that concept of nation, but it is just how it came together that is incidental, how it is dealt with is different. Actually, I believe there is a lot more butterfly effect in history than most people realize.
Sometimes it seems you don’t entirely agree with your father’s Romantic view of the strength of connections between pre-Spanish polities 😅 Personally I think having a Romanticized view of history avoids actual historical greats while whitewashing the negatives. I tend to prefer a holistic view.
What does Dr. Xiao Chua have to say to other Filipino regional ethnicities that refuse to subscribe to the Tagalog-centric national mythos? At the current pace of population growth, the nation probably will be distilled down in a Tagalog/Ilokano majority Luzon vs Cebuano majority in Visayas and Mindanao, with non-Tagalogs and non-Cebuano Visayans dwindling. A ticking time bomb that warrants attention.
I think it’s a mistake to adopt a permanent revolutionary mindset as often happens in the Philippines. History should be taught, illustrious individuals should be honored, but I often have an uneasy feeling that the Philippines is a nation struggling to vault onto the future, while being held back by its past. An example I shared with Filipino friends who are open minded is that a large percentage of the venerated US Founders were slave owners, while espousing Enlightenment ideals of universal equality. It was clear that the US Founders struggled with this themselves; e.g. Thomas Jefferson wrote many times about the institution of slavery and the moral righteousness or lack of honor in the practice. But despite these flaws, here in the US we continually march towards our ideals of equality.
To an outside observer such as myself, it seems to me that the period of Philippine history that is most relevant starts in the American period, accelerating through the Commonwealth and the early days of the Third Republic, finally coming to recent history with Martial Law and the subsequent democratic rebirth. That is to say, prior history leading up to the contemporary period should inform, but not define the nation. All too often, the common understanding seems to be that Filipinos allow past history define themselves, becoming self-constrained which is an impediment to moving to the future. A nation and its people have the capacity to reinvent themselves if there is popular will to do so.
Dr. Xiao Chua has a quite optimistic and positive view about the future, but I often sense that MLQ3 is a bit more cynical. Perhaps MLQ3 sees disappointment in the grand vision of his grandfather not reaching full existence. I was looking for the vlog on how Filipino came to be for Fil-Ams but couldn’t find it, so if you have time please kindly share.
There’s value in diversity, such as in the US which is made up of a patchwork of territories colonized by disparate European nations, while also having the capacity to absorb incoming culture from immigration. Arguably the US also has her problems Romantic views, but eventually each group evolved into a unique regional culture tied to the national ideal which is inclusive enough to hold everyone under the same tent.
I hadn’t considered the butterfly effect, but it seems to fit how nations are formed where it was up to the first few generations to define the national mythos and stick to it. Consider how Rome was founded. Originally Rome was a marshy swamp inhabited by castaways, pirates and ne’er-do-wells of neighboring Latin city states. Overtime they decided to overthrow their rex, who basically was the biggest, baddest thug among them and establish the Roman Republic. It was only after that the people of Rome coalesced around a national mythos that ret-conned their founders back to the refugees from Troy and the twins Romulus and Remus, all mythological. But this mythos worked out even after the Roman Republic transitioned into the Roman Empire. The people decided collectively to make due with what was present, and go on from there. The Romantic past wasn’t a detriment because it was constructed *after* the city state was firmly established to explain the unknown unknowns.
To continue the butterfly effect, while the Canadians resent the fact, they are more closely connected to Americans than they are to the British. As fate would have it, during the American Revolutionary War and again during the War of 1812, the US failed to capture and hold critical cities due to British Navy supremacy and Canadian First Nations tribes allying with Canada. Besides small unsanctioned raiding parties here and there, the issue was shelved… though considering Canada is largely dependent on American defense and economy, who knows, they may voluntarily petition to join the US in this century. My guess is the US interest would be better served if Canada was a separate country. Austria and Germany are also an interesting case study. Austria speaks a prestige variant of German as an artifact of them being previously the rump state of the Holy Roman Empire under the Habsburgs, to which they are proud of. Compare to Germany which was cobbled together from dozens of city states and small princedoms with the rise of German nationalism in Hohenzollern-Brandenburg Prussia. There’s a clear dividing line in culture, even if both Austria and Germany share a common language. Nations founded on ethnic identity only work if the ethnicity is more or less homogeneous with strict enforcement of migration changing the ethnic makeup, such as Japan, Korea, China. The big mistake of the first and second Philippine founding was basing the identity along ethnic lines, when clearly there were multiple ethnic groups who were regulated to “dialect” status. Also can’t ignore that under Japanese occupation, English was suppressed by the collaboration government at the insistence of the Imperial Japanese Philippine Executive Commission, which vastly increased the number of Tagalog speakers between the 1939 and 1948 censuses.
I just did a custom Google search of your old “bahala na gangs” comment from nearly a decade ago. Always surprising how much my previous experiences and what I’ve learned in the last 3 decades of the Philippines tends to closely align with your views. I came to the same conclusion long ago, that currently the Philippines is currently multiple nations that are balkanized, to also include the American-centric diaspora and OFWs. Pleasantly agree that you had also had a feeling long ago that the Millennials will be the one to finally unify the Philippines.
Two links:
The Youtube video I mentioned:
MLQ3 about when the Philippines started looking backwards.
https://opinion.inquirer.net/121916/looking-backwards
I have my five minutes of fame in that article as I am quoted.
Even now in California, which has a large Fil-Am population, most Fil-Ams do their grocery shopping at Chinese or Vietnamese-owned grocery stores, which incidentally have learned to carry Filipino-specific items. There’s often even fresh longganisa, Filipino-style hot dogs, and Filipino-specific cuts of meat… all done within the grocery store in their meat department. Whenever I decide to cook Filipino food for the week, I can buy everything I need at the Vietnamese market. Until very recently, the closest Filipino market was the Seafood City on the other side of Los Angeles (I live in the suburbs south of LA), which I’m not willing to travel that far regularly. The Japanese-American community has dwindled over the years as they moved on from farming as the area suburbanized, but there’s still many Japanese restaurants and 4 major Japanese supermarkets in the area!
It’s a shame because the Philippines offers a plethora of seafood and produce that often doesn’t get exported. Even the famous Philippine mango being sold here in the West carries a “Product of Philippines” attestation on the packaging as more of an exotic marketing factor. The actual exporter is a non-Filipino firm that travels the world sourcing products to sell abroad. One can wonder who takes the majority of the profit, the Filipino producer or the exporter.
I also had some experience with trying my hand in export ventures from the Philippines, to sell dehydrated fruits from Mindanao. My former Philippines-side business partner basically wanted me to do all the work while providing them their portion of the profits. As soon as I got tired, and told the business partner they need to do their part, the venture ended.
On the software side, while I’m a proponent of hiring American due to cultural and work ethic reasons, I’m the CTO in a small startup and due to limited funds in the early stages we decided to outsource. I first decided to look into hiring Filipino software engineers, thinking a strong command of English would be helpful when the resources work with US resources, but ultimately I wasn’t pleased with the quality of engineers we found. The lack of work ethic, tendency to show up to work late, and thin skins in the face of constructive feedback also were big issues. We ultimately decided to outsource to Vietnam’s burgeoning software development industry. The Vietnamese developers are responsive, prompt, and their work product continually improves with additional feedback. I had never encountered this lack of seriousness about work from Filipinos abroad. Fil-Ams are regularly in top positions and are very competent.
Fascinating that you outsource the development of software. How do you certify it as bug free and secure? Curious.
As part of software development, there are usually “code reviews” where at a minimum the software lead and the information security lead will review all written code with the team. There are also other safeguards as the code goes through QA and testing to catch bugs and possible security issues. All requires oversight by the project manager and/or architect, but as we see in even large companies the ball gets dropped more often than not. Usually the leak or hack originates in one or a few people who didn’t follow proper protocols, then that wasn’t caught during audit and review. Overall if people followed standard industry programming and security practices, there won’t be many security issues.
One of the hats I wear is enterprise solutions architect, so I take code and security reviews quite seriously. I’d be the first to be blamed if something goes wrong.
are you familiar with the Sriracha spat, Joey? I heard the Thai or Vietnamese owner went to Mexico to get his chilis there. then the White farmer i guess Ventura, sued him cuz they had an agreement. then his Mexican farmers screwed him over. and the Ventura farmer went his own way making his own Sriracha. i think he won the case. his brand now selling in COSTCO which i’ve not seen yet. so the Irwindale plant supposedly isn’t moving as much as before. with the whole Sriracha market upended. i think this is it https://underwoodranches.com wondering if you had any inside knowledge on this debacle. what really happened.
Huy Fong (Rooster brand) Sriracha sauce is owned by a Chinese-Vietnamese family, based on the family recipe for Vietnamese hot sauce which the family originally made from peppers they grew on their farm outside of Saigon before they became refugees following the Vietnam war. The family fled Vietnam when the new communist government started seizing capital and land from ethnic Chinese Vietnamese. My family’s land on both sides was seized also. We used to have vast plantations to the south of Saigon (Binh Duong) and in the central highland mountain provinces (Kon Tum) that have been in our family for generations (we’re distant branch relatives of the Nguyen dynasty on both sides).
The founder of Huy Fong Foods named his company after the Taiwanese freighter ship “Huey Fong” that his family escaped on. The name Sriracha is named after the Thai farming town of Si Racha famous for its chili farms, which had many ethnic Cantonese immigrants who settled there in the early 1900s who fled various wars. The sauce itself is actually based of not a Thai chili sauce, but a Cantonese/Vietnamese garlic chili sauce. Historically before the absorption of the Malay Cham people following the 1471 Dai Viet-Cham War caused by Champa piracy and Champa being allied with the Ming Chinese Empire, Vietnamese people are closely related to the people of present day Guangdong, especially the Cantonese. This meant that ethnic Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, Nung etc. Chinese traders were always present throughout most of Vietnam’s history, as in most of Southeast Asia. Some settled and are considered Vietnamese in nationality but ethnically distinct.
My father happens to be close friends with the founder of Huy Fong, Mr. David Tran. Basically what had happened is Huy Fong Foods is a family-owned corporation whose business “worked” for decades, and right when Sriracha sauce was about to make its breakout success, the founder decided he was getting old and wanted his children to take over the business. The son-in-law, who has an MBA, wanted to take the company in a direction based on what he learned in MBA school, which is to say he wanted to squeeze the chili supplier to increase the profit margin which until then wasn’t that big. In short, he failed which initiated the legal battle between Huy Fong Foods and Underwood. By the way, until the legal battle, the Huy Fong Sriracha sauce chilis have been grown in Ventura, California. The issue with the Irwindale residents is separate from the Huy-Fong/Underwood legal case, in which the residents complained about the pungent smell from the (still small) Huy Fong factory which is located in an suburban area, while the city of Irwindale derives a lot of tax revenue and business from Huy Fong.
The MBA son-in-law moved chili production to Mexico, and the Mexican farmers couldn’t figure out how to produce the same quality of chilis which is why the sauce tasted weird for a few years. Apparently the quality of the chilis has been fixed by now because I can’t taste any difference in my current bottle of Sriracha. The chili sourcing is more broad now, being grown in California, New Mexico, and Mexico. In the meantime, major condiment makers saw the cult favorite status of Sriracha sauce, so they copied the name (but not the recipe. Still haven’t tried a third-party sriracha sauce that’s good). Huy Fong tried to sue, but of course lost because a name of an actual place can’t be trademarked which opened the floodgates for tons of copycats.
So basically, it’s a lesson in how the second generation can screw up the foundation of success that the first generation built when the children try to implement the fancy new things they learned in school, without having actual life or business experience. I still buy Huy Fong Sriracha since it’s the most authentic Vietnamese chili sauce, and to support a family-owned business vs sriracha knockoffs made by the huge behemoths like Cargill or Heinz. I mean, it’s a Vietnamese garlic chili sauce… trust the Vietnamese company for the authentic flavor. As for the Underwood Sriracha knockoff, I will note that no Vietnamese people buy that brand, and to be fair, quite a few Mexicans whose family members previously worked in Vietnamese/Chinese restaurants also don’t buy that brand at Costco.
Wonderful lesson here.
Ah, thanks. Best wishes on your enterprise.
The start up is a side gig I do in addition to my regular clients (currently American Honda). Just small potatoes in relation to the consulting fees I earn elsewhere, but with an aim to make the business successful so the shares are worth something in the future. That’s the aim anyway.
As you know, American universities are incubators of new ideas with investors lining up to sprinkle a bit of money here and there for startups. This startup was founded on an idea by a biological sciences college student at UC Irvine, though he has since left the company (went back for his law degree). His professor had connections to various investors which jump started the company.
Sounds like a fun fun “hobby”, for sure.
The Enterprise: To boldly go where no man has gone before.
Ha, yes, that, too!
Three examples
Partnering with local distributors is quite the norm.
Even big car companies started with that here.
Toyota had Delta Motors and its supply chain
Mercedes had Cats dealerships
That is all well and good, but it might be the big picture still is that a lot of Filipino businesses think just of selling their stuff but not cornering markets.
Or like having a proper music industry that exports is different from a few performances in Vegas or concerts to a captive Filipino overseas audience. If the mindset is changing, it seems to be still taking place slowly, though evidence to the contrary is welcome.
Joey Nguyen mentioned Chinese-Vietnamese and they from what I heard are even present as traders in the Munich wholesale market (for fruits, vegetables and flowers) even as the majority of traders there are either Germans or Italians. It is higher up the food chain for sure.
Well, as far it Chinese-Vietnamese goes there are distinctions. Vietnamese consider Cantonese, Fujianese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew to be cousins anyway, since the mythical history places the origins of these ethnic groups in what’s now Guangdong and Fujian. However, Vietnamese make a sharp distinction between the Han Chinese (Hoa people). So while there is sometimes abrasiveness with Chinese traders in Vietnam in prior periods, there is also a sense of kinship. There was a period of tension though, especially with the Chinese-Vietnamese community in the Cholon district of Saigon after the fall of South Vietnam, as the new communist government considered the Cholon community to be capitalists and many were persecuted in political prisons. Many of the pre-1975 Chinese-Vietnamese living in Cholon originated from later waves of Chinese migration escaping the turmoil of the colonial period, so they weren’t as integrated compared to earlier communities like the Teochew.
Here in the US, Chinese-Vietnamese are accepted as members of the Vietnamese community, as they are in other diaspora communities in other countries. In terms of business though, I think at least in the US Vietnamese have overtaken Chinese-Vietnamese in terms of business, politics, public life. We are still fond of doing our grocery shopping at 99 Ranch Market though, which was founded by a Chinese-Vietnamese family, and while it’s known as a Chinese market now, its first market was solidly a Vietnamese market in the heart of the Vietnamese community here in Southern California (in fact it was the first Vietnamese supermarket).
In my other comment I expounded a bit about the trading history of ancient to near modern Vietnam. I wonder, did the various pre-Spanish Philippine polities engage in any long distance trading to the mainland? Not just island hopping inter-island or to Malaysia, Indonesia. Vietnamese traders had historically traded as far as the Korean kingdoms, Japan, India, and of course maritime Southeast Asia. There are various archeological evidence of Vietnamese trade, such as pottery, ceramic-ware, swords and various weapons in far distant places.
There are Portuguese records of Luçoes (Luzonians) trading in Malacca, which is the mainland, though still the Malay world. Laura Lee Junker is very comprehensive about archeological evidence of China, Vietnam, and Thailand trading with the Philippines, detailing which polities had more expensive Chinese jewelry or the less expensive Thai and Vietnamese jewelry. “Day, your jewelry is just fancy. Mine is made in China,” said the Queen of Cebu to her Samar cousin. Jokes aside, there was clearly more initiative from Mainland Asia. The archipelago was not yet at the stage the Greeks were when they razed Troy and later exceeded the mainland. Even Visayans who came quite far managed to raid Taiwan at some point but never the mainland.
https://joeam.com/2020/09/14/philippines-from-the-edge-to-the-middle-of-things/ was the article where I actually checked how far Manila to Hanoi was in nautical miles and found out it is roughly as far as Beirut to Cadiz. Seven days by sail based on sailing infos I Googled then.
Perhaps it was best that mainland raiding was kept to a minimum due to distance around the ancient maritime Southeast Asian trade route, besides the Visayan foray to the Austronesian homeland of Formosa. The Vietnamese and to a lesser extent, the Thais, didn’t look kindly upon “piracy,” which was one of the main reasons why Champa was destroyed when Champa entered a period of instability where the paramount king wasn’t able to control the smaller chieftains’ raiding habits.
As a child I was fascinated by Thor Hyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki expedition where he traced the proto-Austronesian, Indo-Malay, then Polynesian trade networks on what was his idea of a native ocean-going catamaran boat. The theory now is heavily disputed, but the ancient island trade networks still capture my imagination. Undoubtedly, the Javanese trimaran and Polynesian catamaran proved that long distance travel by sea was possible. I’ve always wondered if the ancient inhabitants of the Philippines kept the skills of producing such oceangoing vessels, or if the skills gradually waned.
By the turn of the first millennium, the Vietnamese Lý imperial dynasty already had a formidable navy, as evidenced by the capture of Qinzhou, Yongzhou and Lianzhou by a force of over 50,000 marines under admiral Lý Thường Kiệt in 1075 during the Lý-Song War. To return the favor, the Chinese Song imperial dynasty sent a force of 300,000 soldiers and sailors who were decisively destroyed in the Battle of the Cầu River. Trade was treated with a laissez-faire attitude, with various dynasties building infrastructure that were used by independent merchant clans or merchant consortia. While the Vietnamese had their own sailing ship design, interestingly both the ancient Vietnamese thuyền buồm and the Chinese chuán (junk) adapted shipbuilding techniques from the Indo-Malay kunlun po of maritime Southeast Asia to make the mainland ships more seaworthy for long trips. For example, the main reason the Vietnamese thuyền buồm was so powerful with both warfare and trade in the near maritime was that it was a multi-purpose ship used for both trade and as an amphibious troop carrier, with modifications for littoral and riverine fighting. There was definitely fluid mixing of technologies and sharing of knowledge done in those ancient times among neighbors.
As you shared in your old post, there probably wasn’t a direct route taken to the Philippines, rather the trading consisted of island hopping around the curve of maritime Southeast Asia. Also fascinating is that during the escape of the Vietnamese boat people following 1975, many followed the ancient trade routes reaching as far as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia. My father piloted one such boat from Vũng Tàu to Terengganu, Malaysia. My mother’s boat had bad luck heading in the same direction, drifting to peninsular Thailand, and eventually to Pulau Galang, Indonesia.
“The son-in-law, who has an MBA, wanted to take the company in a direction based on what he learned in MBA school, which is to say he wanted to squeeze the chili supplier to increase the profit margin which until then wasn’t that big. In short, he failed which initiated the legal battle between Huy Fong Foods and Underwood.” Thanks! Joey. this is the best accounting of what happened. I started with Sriracha from going to Pho restaurants. I did notice that difference. and thought that was related to the whole Irwindale plant complaints, like they changed their recipe to accommodate the neighbors. but that it was the Mexican chilis makes more sense. i’ve not tried the Underwood brand nor the others. I read the LATimes (i think) article on this, and some posts on reddit. but you just explained the whole thing perfectly. now I know. I can tell you that their Sriracha is main stable in CA prisons. both Mexicans and blacks and Whites, you’ll see ’em in their cells.
Yes, over time even the Mexican chili suppliers figured out how to grow the chilis correctly for the Sriracha recipe, so it all worked out in the end. But as of a few years ago the chili supply has been diversified to other California and New Mexico farms as well. Underwood is often seen as the “little guy” here going up against a billionaire. Huy Fong is run like a mom-and-pop business lol. It’s a bit ironic since I’ve visited Underwood and they are also billionaires so… The son-in-law messed up. This should’ve been resolved privately since there was a long standing relationship.