Mindanao can feed the world

"Give me Mindanao and we'll feed the world!"

Our pastor aka life coach last Sunday was quoting a certain Japanese who, some time ago, declared that same line after seeing the treasure house of natural resources that is Mindanao, the southernmost part of our island.  I googled up the source - and could find only the same quote told anecdotally in a few blogs.

Not really sure, then, how accurate  that quote or even story is - but if there is a grain of truth to it, it does make you wonder how much of a treasure chest the poor boy that is the Philippines is sitting on. 

That imagery is again part of a quote - and I first heard it decades ago from my uncle, the Roman Catholic bishop of Maasin.  I didn't understand the context then as I was barely in high school, and ideas of our vast natural resources being wasted by neglect or indifference were the farthest thing from our mind. 

What did make me pause long enough through that dinner was his quote of an American businessman who had visited us during that time - and this was in the middle 1970s.  My uncle said that the Yank had gone to some of our provinces  and left shaking and sighing.  Apparently, he told my uncle, "You people have no idea what you've got down in your country.  The kind of waterfalls you got - they can generate enough electricity to light up Manila - for free."

A poor boy totally clueless about the wealth lying around in his own backyard.  When do we wake up?

 

The Philippines' damaged culture by James Fallows

I'll be opening a new (or maybe) old can of worms here - but this extremely long essay by James Fallows of the Atlantic Monthly, written 20 years ago as a warning that the euphoric EDSA Revolution will not last long, really merits after all this time serious consideration.  Warning:  it can hurt, and hurt like hell. 

Basically, even back then, Fallows predicted that our place in the sun will not last long, and that our Asian neighbors will overtake us - because our culture at its core is damaged.  Blame Spanish conquistadors, American coddling, the widening gap between rich and poor, the entrenched cronyism and feudalism - but at the end of the day, doesn't matter who's responsible, if we don't get our act together, understand our illness and heal it, we'll be living in this wretched state for eternity.

Just a sample paragraph from Fallows' article:

"What has created a society in which people feel fortunate to live in a garbage dump because the money is so good? Where some people shoo flies away from others for 300 pesos, or $ 15, a month? It can't be any inherent defect in the people: outside this culture they thrive. Filipino immigrants to the United States are more successful than immigrants from many other countries. Filipino contract laborers, working for Japanese and Korean construction companies, built many of the hotels, ports, and pipelines in the Middle East. "These are the same people who shined under the Japanese managers,' Blas Ople, a veteran politician, told me. "But when they work for Filipino contractors, the schedule lags.' It seems unlikely that the problem is capitalism itself, even though Philippine Marxists argue endlessly that it grinds up the poor to feed the rich. If capitalism were the cause of Philippine underdevelopment, why would its record be so different everywhere else in the region? In Japan, Korea, Singapore, and elsewhere Asian-style capitalism has not only led to trade surpluses but also created Asia's first real middle class. Chinese economists can't call what they're doing capitalism, but they can go on for hours about how "market reforms' will lead to a better life for most people.



If the problem in the Philippines does not lie in the people themselves or, it would seem, in their choice between capitalism and socialism, what is the problem? I think it is cultural, and that it should be thought of as a failure of nationalism."

Now here's the actual link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/1987/11/a-damaged-culture-a-new-philippines/7414

Read, weep, then pick yourself up and think.  Then let's talk.  Maybe there's still a way out of this.  There has to be.

400 years of servitude: the reason for Pinoy indifference?

It was a statement that stunned me into thinking, and right now, still without answers, it's on my to-study list.  During a break in a magazine interview which tackled a national lack of interest in developing our country potentials like tourism and its related branches, my interviewee, the CEO I was interviewing, said point-blank that the indifference was pervasive in us Pinoys, and cannot just be blamed our leaders.  The lady was a second-generation Tsinoy whose dad embodied the rags-to-riches story of a Chinese immigrant who rose from practically nothing.  Growing up, she found herself asking if she was truly more alien than what was obvious.

To describe it in corporate parlance, her dad raised her to have a sense of ownership in the things she was doing, regardless of the scope of the project or the task.  To have a strong sense of responsibility that would ensure that the project would not just succeed, it would flourish.  To have a strong sense of accountability that would not pass the buck to anybody else.  Others did not seem to feel as strongly.  They let work fell by the wayside or maybe did not fight as much for the things they said they believed in.  Her Pinoy peers were not in for the long haul.

"I didn't have that DNA of 400 years of servitude that the average Pinoy has," the lady said emphatically.

Servitude = slave mentality.  It means an ingrained sense of bowing down to colonial masters.  It means not possessing a firm sense that what you think you own is truly yours  - and as such can never be yours.  It means a subconscious attitude that you will never really succeed...so why be responsible and accountable?

How deeply entrenched is that attitude in our DNA?  Is the CEO right? Granted that there are individual exceptions, still, is that why our workforce has been labeled to have an 'employee' mentality, as opposed to an entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese, the explorer attitude of the Europeans or the gungho conquer-the-frontier mindset of an American?

As I said, this theory on Pinoy indifference  on my to-study list.  All I got are questions.  Let you know once I post the answers.