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.