Continuing Agricultural Development

Recession and Revival

By the early 1950s, the cabbage boom in central Buguias had fizzled. Lack of quality seeds undercut Buguias growers, who were evidently outbid by more prosperous farmers along the Mountain Trail. A more serious problem was oversupply. As new land was cleared along the Mountain Trail, the cabbage harvest expanded apace. The Buguias gardeners could not easily compete with their ridge-top rivals, who enjoyed inexpensive transport and a cool climate better suited to cabbage. But as prices dropped, even the most favored areas suffered, and not a few Benguet farmers began to revert to subsistence crops. By the early 1950s, the market often glutted (Baguio Midland Courier May 10, 1953), and the nascent vegetable industry fell into its first recession.

Crisis was staved off in part by new crops. Unlike cabbage, other vegetables, heretofore largely limited to the Baguio region, remained fitfully profitable. Carrots especially attracted Buguias farmers, as they thrived in the moderate climate and rich soils of the Agno Valley. A sack of carrots, however, did make a heavy burden to carry up to the Mountain Trail roadhead. Lighter crops, including peas, beans, and bell peppers, were thus also attractive. Along the Mountain Trail, potatoes came to rival cabbage as the mainstay, but the market for this crop also began to reach saturation.

The real break for Buguias truck gardening came in 1958, when a branch road was pushed down the Agno Valley as far as the center

of the village. Now growers could truck their produce a mere 15 kilometers to Abatan and the Mountain Trail. As transport costs diminished, carrots emerged as Buguias's prime crop. Other vegetables also proliferated, as the Agno Valley began to reap the benefits of its equable climate. By the early 1960s, the economy of Buguias rested squarely on some half-dozen temperate and subtropical vegetables.

Agricultural inputs boosted the renewed vegetable expansion of the late 1950s. Growers could now increasingly afford chemical fertilizers, and the use of lowland chicken manure spread. Although some gardeners had used DDT as early as the late 1940s, the late 1950s marked the widespread adoption of the backpack sprayer and the introduction of various special-purpose insecticides. Insecticides helped growers as much by saving labor (from the arduous task of insect plucking) as by allowing higher yields. High-quality fungicides, introduced in the same period, probably had an even greater impact, since wet-season humidity fostered vigorous fungal growth. Growers had earlier applied a copper-sulfate powder mixed with hydrated lime, but this attacked human skin as effectively as it killed fungus. With the safer new products, potatoes could be competitively grown in the Agno Valley, and the tuber crop increased approximately tenfold.

The Agricultural Cooperatives

A state-initiated cooperative marketing and supply scheme also stimulated the vegetable industry in the late fifties. The co-op movement received impetus not only from the state's desire to enhance local economic development but, perhaps more importantly, from its wish to rid the vegetable industry of alien—meaning Chinese-control (Baguio Midland Courier Jan. 8, 1956). Local and national leaders concurred that to stabilize the vegetable market, seen as a prerequisite for orderly development, they first had to uproot the Chinese growing and marketing organization. This "cartel" was said to practice "unfair trade . . . and cutthroat competition" (Hamada 1960). The Chinese could be displaced, they hoped, by local cooperatives united under government supervision.

In 1952, the Farmer's Cooperative Marketing Association (FACOMA) appeared in Benguet (Fry 1983:220), the first of its

kind. Branches of FACOMA soon sprouted in several municipalities; these in turn all operated under the aegis of the government's Agricultural Credit and Cooperative Financing Administration (ACCFA). The state directed the FACOMA to distribute subsidized fertilizers and biocides and to assist in produce marketing. In both areas, middlemen were to be eliminated, to the benefit of farmers and consumers alike. The Central Cooperative Exchange in Manila supplied chemicals, both domestic and imported. The Benguet FACOMA eventually purchased several large trucks for hauling vegetables to market and agricultural chemicals back to the farm areas, while the ACCFA financed several centrally located warehouses, from which vegetables could be shipped directly to Manila.

The FACOMA co-ops enjoyed modest success through the 1950s and early 1960s. Though perennially undercapitalized, they did provide credit to a few local entrepreneurs, nourishing a locally run agribusiness infrastructure. But early hopes that the co-ops would wrest financial control from the Chinese were soon dashed (Baguio Midland Courier May 5, 1963; Hamada 1960). The Chinese merchants had created a sophisticated and perennially solvent organization; where the co-ops usually worked on consignment, they could generally offer cash to the currency-strapped farmers (Fry 1983:220; Baguio Midland Courier May 10, 1953). They also enjoyed immediate knowledge of marketing conditions in Manila, thanks to extensive radio connections with local operatives there.

Faced with the failure of the cooperative effort to oust the Chinese, the Igorot gardeners resorted to political action. As early as 1955, FACOMA leaders trekked to Manila to protest the presence of "alien" farmers and dealers along the Mountain Trail (Baguio Midland Courier Dec. 4, 1955). As the political pressure intensified, then-president Ramon Magsaysay opted for direct action: in 1956, he signed into law Executive Order 180, commanding the summary expulsion of all Chinese farmers from the Mountain Trail vegetable district (Fry 1983:220).

Magsaysay's antialien policies were part of a larger program designed to aid small farmers throughout the Philippines, to ensure the ecological sustainability of highland agriculture, and to solidify state authority in rural areas. Government officials fretted over the unconstrained vegetable industry; gardens were increasingly being cleared in Mount Data National Park, erosion was accelerat-

ing, and watersheds were being denuded. By official criteria, some 94 percent of all Benguet vegetable farms were illegally occupied (Baguio Midland Courier Jan. 8, 1956). Magsaysay viewed the Chinese evictions as a necessary precondition before land titles could be awarded to the indigenous gardeners, most of whom were at the time considered squatters in their own homeland. Legal land ownership, it was thought, would encourage ecologically sound agriculture just as it would promote local economic development.

Magsaysay's death in 1958 cut short these ambitious plans. Much to the disappointment of Benguet leaders, the Chinese remained, although some would be expelled some ten years later. The cooperatives persisted for some years, but as government support diminished, most slowly withered; others, however, fell quickly owing to local corruption (Fry 1983:221).