In 1965, already established in Butuan City, Agusan del Norte, our family bought some land in Davao City. It was in Tugbok District, close to Calinan, some 25 kilometers from the Davao City Hall.
My old man wanted to go into farming, and bought 142 hectares of gradually rolling terrain with a brook within. Not being a real farmer to begin with, he experimented with bananas and rubber, but failed. Then he bought grafted planting material of what was then called “Chinese” pomelos, with its pink flesh, sweet and juicy. That clicked.
Through the years of Martial Law, and after I hired a consultant from the Bureau of Plant Industry in Lipa, an expert in citrus, who taught us how to properly correct the acidity of our soil, and use the right mix of fertilizers, we soon produced high-quality pomelos, now of course called “Davao” pomelos.
Then came the problem of marketing the farm produce. There were smart buyers who offered low ex-farm prices. By that time, and after a few years of working in big firms, I had become an entrepreneur. My mother had a fairly large property in Pasay City which we could use as warehouse and re-packing site (before containers became domestically available for shipping, our pomelos were packed in wooden crates), and in the ports of Cebu and Manila, stevedores would “steal” fruits from the crates, so we lost some 10 percent, even more due to pilferage. And we needed to repack to replace the stolen fruits, aside from removing some spoiled fruit.
I handled the marketing in Manila and sold wholesale to Carmen Planas St. in Divisoria, in San Andres, and elsewhere. When there were so many imported apples competing, I would use cold storage facilities (Insular in Manila, FTI in Taguig) to lengthen the shelf life of my produce, which I labeled “Golden.”
After a year of hits and misses, I bought the produce from my parents myself, and made a “killing” on the spread between “pakyaw” price and my Metro Manila selling efforts. It was a difficult job, and I had other medium-scale business interests, but the money was good.
Trouble was, my old man got wary of the growth of insurgency in Davao, which had degenerated into some kind of no man’s land, even in the city proper itself, and decided to give it to the Department of Agrarian Reform on voluntary sale. Some 32 hectares of retention for me and my siblings I sold, since by then, we were all into our respective professional pursuits and no one was interested in farming.
But we invested in Butuan real estate and forsook “trouble-ridden” Davao. Neither my parents nor I foresaw that Edsa Uno would also bring about a Rodrigo Roa Duterte to leadership in Davao City.
Meanwhile, Butuan, the once-upon-a-time “timber capital” of the Philippines, started degenerating. The loggers who raped our forests did not re-plant, with the notable exception of very few, such as Don Luis Fernandez’ Nasipit Lumber which even processed sawmill waste into the now-extinct “lawanit.” Displaced logging workers who came from Bohol, Southern Leyte, Cebu and other parts soon became poverty-stricken, and tried to eke out marginal survival in the logged-over areas.
The loggers who struck gold by raping the land went into politics, and “timber city” became the “vote-buying capital” of the country. The logger-politicians decidedly kept the economy stagnant, even decrepit, so that they merely had to buy the people’s votes every election, until almost everyone but the few rich and educated became hooked into the two, thence-three year vice of selling their votes. Nakasanayan na. In 1988, Vice-Mayor Rodrigo Duterte ran against the mayor Cory and Nene Pimentel appointed as OIC-Mayor. Against an incumbent supported by the palace, Duterte’s fight was uphill.
But by then, Davao was as chaotic as Nicaragua, which was why the NPA-controlled Agdao District, just some three kilometers away from City Hall itself, was labeled “Nicaragdao.” It was at that time that my parents decided to leave Davao and concentrate on our native Butuan. Davaoenos, meanwhile, saw hope in Duterte.
Wrong decision, it turned out. Duterte won, and started an unbroken leadership of the city. In his first term, he turned around the lawlessness, and in succeeding terms as mayor of the largest city (territorially) in the country, he transformed Davao into a peaceful haven for both business and ordinary residents. Its economy grew by leaps and bounds, it’s growth rate higher than the national average.
Butuanons kept selling their votes, and got bad governance in return. The political families cashed-in on the newly-found wealth coming from the Internal Revenue Allotments provided by the Local Government Code, as well as real estate taxes. Only when then Congresswoman Ching Plaza got Butuan to be the regional capital of the newly-formed Caraga administrative region was some life breathed into the local economy, courtesy of national government salaries. But little else of economic significance came.
Now of course there is mining in Caraga, even as there has been minimally incremental growth in agriculture, but the once-lowly Surigao provinces have began to outstrip the progress of the once-wealthy Butuan and the Agusan provinces.
Tourism is non-existent, though foreigners and locals merely land in the Butuan City airport in Bancasi, on their way to the beaches of the Surigao provinces.
These days, the water system in Butuan is down, the result of a corruption-laced privatization deal. The water that flows into taps is murky, and when it rains, the source of water is so silted and polluted that the water system is turned off. Ironically, when the streets are flooded and the rains pour, the faucets are dry.
Garbage has piled uncollected in the streets, and City Hall seems either clueless or unconcerned. If this happened in Metro Manila, the TV stations would have shown the detritus on prime time, goading the local government to work overtime. But Butuan City is remote to imperial Manila, and so the residents just suffer, many unable to complain because hell, they sold their votes, did they not?
Meanwhile, the Prime Minster of Japan visited a progressive and environmentally conscious Davao whose long-time mayor is now President of the Philippines.
This, while the rich politicians north of Davao still milk whatever is left from the dying corpus of Butuan’s economy.
This is a tale of two cities, and a case study of what good governance, versus bad, means.