The Prewar Vegetable Industry

Vegetables in Benguet

The Spanish introduced cabbages and potatoes to the Cordillera well before they had established political control. Potts (1983) argues for two separate potato disseminations, the first in the late 1600s or early 1700s, and the second, linked to Benguet's first Spanish governor, Bias de Bafios, in the nineteenth century. The southern Cordillerans readily adopted both cabbages and potatoes for their door-yard gardens. Both crops were casually traded among Igorot communities and some produce was sold in nearby lowland

market towns (Perez 1902:118); as early as the 1860s, Benguet potatoes appeared in the Manila market (Scott 1974:239).

American Encouragement

When the Americans occupied the Philippines, the demand for temperate vegetables grew. Chinese and Japanese laborers, brought to southern Benguet to build Baguio City and its connecting roads, soon began cultivating a variety of market-garden crops. Trinidad Valley, near Baguio and endowed with fertile and easily irrigated soils, formed the center of the emergent vegetable industry. Japanese capital dominated until independence, and local Ibaloi villagers eventually supplied most of the labor. A second cradle of vegetable culture emerged on the high plateau of Paoay (in Atok Municipality, north of Bagio), where an American soldier, Guy Haight, established a residence and rest house while recovering from tuberculosis (Davis 1973:58). Despite his distance from Baguio, Haight managed to deliver vegetables to the city, and he also supplied the travelers who lodged at his place. Through their association with Haight, many of Atok's residents learned the techniques of market gardening.

American officials encouraged vegetable culture among the Benguet people. As early as 1901, they distributed seeds from an agricultural office (Fry 1983:216), and not long afterward they established an experimental station largely devoted to temperate vegetables in La Trinidad. The Catholic Church also fostered vegetable growing in the districts it missionized (Russell 1983: 192).

With such encouragement, the market-garden frontier began to advance. In Baguio and environs, vegetable growing spread among the local Ibaloi; by 1907 they were reported to be abandoning their mining works in favor of the more profitable truck gardens (Philippine Commission 1907, v. 1: 282). By 1908, nearly 4,000 baskets of potatoes were sold annually in the Baguio market—but demand was still not satisfied (Philippine Commission 1908, v. 1:245).

Vegetables in Buguias

This commercial frontier reached Buguias in the last decade of American rule. In earlier times, transport to Baguio had been too

costly to justify the enterprise on any scale. Only a handful of individuals had grown unimproved cabbages and potatoes for sale to the Japanese workers and American managers employed in the large sawmills to the north and west of Buguias. Local vegetable growing first took hold when the Mountain Trail, snaking along the ridgetop west of Buguias, was made passable to vehicular traffic in the 1930s. Bus service, organized by the Kankana-ey entrepreneur Bado Dangwa, soon provided ready market access. By 1940, the Dangwa Company ran some 173 vehicles, traversing much of the Cordillera (Fry 1983: 130). Even so, Buguias vegetables first had to be ported up to the ridge, a grueling 800-meter climb.

The residents of the small village of Nabalicong, located a few miles southwest of Buguias, soon discovered that dry fields cleared in the oak scrub along the new road produced prime tight-headed cabbages while enjoying easy road access. An American roadconstruction foreman, one "Mr. Clark," also experimented with vegetables in the same area. The Buguias baknang Paran envisaged profit here, and he soon engaged several of his clients to clear new plots in the area. At roughly the same time, two of Paran's sons returned from the agricultural school in Trinidad, seeds in hand, and set about growing cabbage in Buguias proper, first in fallowed rice fields and later in dry fields.

These early vegetable gardens demanded more labor than did subsistence crops. To supply the necessary nutrients, gardeners had to haul ashes and sometimes even composted manure to their garden plots. The Buguias people had long known that such materials would enhance soil fertility, but they judged the effort worthwhile only for the remunerative vegetables. Insects also plagued the new crops much more than the old. Growers dispatched caterpillars and other large insects by hand; fortunately, thrips and other pests too small for manual removal had not yet emerged as serious problems.

While temperate vegetables presented a lucrative trade opportunity, production in the prewar was dominated by the Paran family. Paran's wife, Albina, developed her own specialty in trading peas. A garden pea with a nonedible pod had long been grown in the higher elevation zone immediately east of Buguias. Albina purchased peas from the growers and arranged to have them trucked to Baguio. Pokol, son-in-law of the baknang couple, organized the

Baguio trade. As operator of the village's only store, Pokol frequently traveled to Baguio to purchase supplies; on these trips he began dealing in vegetables as well, acquiring produce both from his family in Buguias and from a few gardeners along the Mountain Trail and selling it in Baguio to Chinese agents.

The vegetable trade was in its infancy when war broke out. The movement to the Mountain Trail, which would become a torrent after the war, was still a trickle. In Buguias, only one family engaged substantially in vegetable growing and trading. Yet only a few years after the return of peace virtually the entire village would be occupied in the vegetable enterprise.