The Society of Honor by Joe America

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By Karl Garcia

Fruits and vegetables once built civilizations. In the Philippines, they built export booms, funded regimes, and shaped rural life—only to expose, again and again, a familiar failure: abundance without governance eventually rots.

From coconuts before Marcos, to bananas and pineapples under Dole and Del Monte, to mangoes, onions, and now durian, the country keeps repeating the same cycle. What makes this moment different is that ASEAN neighbors have already run ahead—and left us a playbook of what to do and what never to repeat, especially as China becomes the dominant buyer shaping regional supply chains.

Coconut Was the First Warning

Before bananas and durian, coconut was king. By the 1950s and 1960s, it anchored Philippine exports and rural livelihoods. Then came the Marcos-era coconut levy—centralizing wealth, extracting from farmers, and starving the sector of reinvestment. By the time reform arrived decades later, trees were old, productivity low, and farmers poor.

Coconut taught a lesson ASEAN neighbors absorbed better than we did: who controls value chains matters more than export volume.

ASEAN’s Palm Oil Lesson: Do the Industry, Don’t Just Export the Crop

Malaysia and Indonesia turned palm oil into one of the most powerful agro-industrial complexes in the world. But their experience offers both do’s and don’ts.

What they did right:

• Built downstream industries (oleochemicals, food processing, biofuels)
• Invested in R&D, replanting, and yield improvement
• Treated palm oil as national industrial strategy, not just a commodity
• Maintained state capacity to shape markets, not just react to them

What they got wrong—and paid for:

• Allowed environmental destruction to outrun governance
• Let smallholders lag behind large estates
• Faced global backlash over sustainability, forcing costly course corrections
• Became exposed to single-commodity dependence

The key lesson for the Philippines is not to copy palm oil—but to understand this: export crops must evolve into diversified value chains, or they collapse under scrutiny, disease, or politics.

Coconut never made that transition. Bananas partially did. Onions never stood a chance.

Durian and China: The New Gold Rush

Durian is today what coconut was in the 1960s and bananas in the 1990s—a boom fueled by external demand, especially from China, which now dominates ASEAN fruit supply chains.

Thailand, Vietnam, and Malaysia show us the do’s and don’ts in real time.

What successful exporters did:

• Imposed strict phytosanitary standards
• Built traceability and farm registration systems
• Controlled export timing and volumes
• Invested in cold chains and logistics
• Treated China not as a spot market, but as a regulated, strategic buyer

Thailand dominates not because it grows more durian—but because it governs the supply chain.

What weaker players risk:

• Overexpansion without quality control
• Farmer exposure to sudden price crashes
• Rejection of shipments over traceability failures
• Dependency on a single market with asymmetric power

China does not just buy fruit. It reshapes production decisions, land use, labor patterns, and pricing structures across ASEAN.

China Is Not the Problem—Dependence Is

China’s scale creates opportunity. But ASEAN history shows the danger of single-market dependence.

Palm oil producers learned this when policy shifts and sustainability pressure squeezed margins. Durian exporters will learn it when China tightens standards or shifts sourcing. The Philippines already learned it painfully with coconuts and bananas—only we learned too late.

The question is not whether to sell to China.
The question is whether the Philippines will govern the relationship—or be governed by it.

Where the Philippines Keeps Failing

Unlike its neighbors, the Philippines repeatedly:

• Treats export booms as temporary windfalls
• Fails to reinvest early in R&D and replanting
• Neglects smallholders while favoring enclaves
• Allows imports and smuggling to undercut domestic producers
• Treats waste as an afterthought instead of a signal

That is why:

• Coconut stagnated for decades
• Mango exports faded
• Banana plantations became disease-vulnerable
• Onions were dumped while imports arrived
• Durian now risks repeating the same arc

Food Waste Is the Final Accounting

More than 80% of biodegradable municipal waste in the Philippines is food. What remains invisible is farm-level waste—harvests abandoned when markets collapse or imports arrive at the wrong time.

Waste is not an accident.
It is the balance sheet of failed coordination.

ASEAN exporters learned—sometimes painfully—that waste, environmental damage, and labor precarity eventually trigger market punishment. The Philippines keeps treating these as externalities.

The ASEAN Do’s and Don’ts—Applied to the Philippines

DO:

• Treat export crops as national systems, not isolated successes
• Build downstream industries and processing capacity
• Invest early in R&D, disease control, and replanting
• Enforce traceability and quality standards before markets demand them
• Diversify export markets before dependence sets in

DON’T:

• Rely on a single crop, single buyer, or single corporate model
• Sacrifice farmers and labor for short-term export gains
• Allow imports and smuggling to undermine domestic production
• Ignore food waste as “inefficiency” instead of policy failure
• Confuse export volume with development

Coconut, Onions, Durian—One Lesson

Coconut showed how political capture destroys farmers.
Palm oil shows how industrial strategy can succeed—and overreach.
Durian shows how China reshapes agriculture overnight.
Onions show what happens when governance collapses entirely.

Different crops. Same test.

A country that lets onions rot while importing substitutes, that lets coconut farmers age into poverty, that risks burning through durian’s boom without safeguards, is not lacking demand or land.

It is lacking strategic discipline.

Fruits and vegetables once built civilizations. In today’s ASEAN, they separate countries that govern abundance from those that merely extract it.

The Philippines still has time to choose which side it belongs to—but the window is closing, and China’s supply chains will not wait.

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