The Inhabitants of the Philippines

by Frederic H. Sawyer

Agricultural.

The great wealth of the Archipelago is undoubtedly to be found in the development of its agriculture. Although the Central and Ilocan Mountains in Luzon and parts of Mindanao are rich in gold, it is the fertile land, the heavy rainfall and the solar heat, that must be utilized to permanently enrich the country. The land is there and the labour is there, and all that is wanting is capital, and a settled government that will make roads and bridges and keep them in repair, clear the rivers of obstructions and improve the ports, and above all, establish and maintain some tolerable courts of justice. The sun, the rain, the soil, and the hardy Philippine farmer will do the rest—a population equal to that of Java could live in affluence in the Philippines.

The agriculture of the Philippines at the time of the first arrival of the Spaniards consisted mainly in the cultivation of rice. It is to the Spaniards that the natives owe the introduction of maize, coffee, cacao, sesame, tobacco, the indigo plant, the sweet potato, and many fruits. They also imported horses, horned cattle, and sheep. But the great development of the cultivation of sugar and hemp is almost entirely due to British capital, with some assistance from Americans.

The natives probably learned from the Chinese how to terrace the hillsides and the sloping lands, and how to erect the pilápiles, or small dykes, for retaining the rain. At that time, and for centuries after, taxes were paid in paddy as they have been in Japan until quite recently.

Under the heading “Tagals,” a description is given of the planting of paddy, and an illustration shows the aspect of a newly-planted paddy-field or tubigan. Mountain rice-lands are called bacores or dalatanes. The cutting and harvesting of paddy is paid for in kind, sometimes in Camarines Sur, a third of the crop is given for getting it in, but in the province of Manila it is cultivated in equal shares to the farmer and the owner of the land.

By looking at the illustration it will be seen that, the fields being divided into such small patches of irregular shapes at different levels, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to use a reaping-machine. I have elsewhere given the reasons for my opinion that the cultivation of rice is the lowest use that the land and the husbandmen can be put to, and whenever the cultivation is given up, it is probably an indication that the cultivators are raising some more profitable crop, and earning money by exporting valuable produce, wherewith to import rice from countries in a lower stage of civilisation.

This is most certainly the case in the Philippines, and year by year, as the exports of hemp, sugar and tobacco have increased, the imports of rice from Saigon and Rangoon have risen correspondingly. And yet the United States’ Department of Agriculture, issued in the latter part of 1899 a circular with the title,’Plant Products of the Philippines,’[1] which, amongst other inaccurate appreciations, says: “It seems strange that an almost exclusively agricultural country should not produce enough food for its own population, but such is at present the case with regard to the Philippines.” It proceeds to say that in some years the value of rice imported into Manila from Saigon was valued at $2,000,000. But I would point out to the author of that circular that the export of the three great staples of the Philippines in those years averaged, perhaps, $30,000,000, and this, evidently, could not have been accomplished if they had cultivated their own rice.

The Spaniards sometimes raised this same groundless clamour, and, perhaps, the author of the circular took it from them; but I look upon it as a great mistake arising from insufficient knowledge of the subject. The rice imported into Manila is largely shipped to the tobacco and hemp provinces, Cagayan and Albay, where the people are exclusively employed in the cultivation and preparation of those valuable products, and are far richer, and on a higher grade of civilisation than the rice-growers of Cochin China.

In the Philippines themselves, the people of the rice-growing districts are the poorest and most backward of all.

Besides paddy, the natives cultivate the dava or míjo (Panicum miliaceum), the mongo, a species of lentil (Phaseolus mungo), called in some provinces balat or balatong, for their own consumption.