The root of the crop we’ll never eat

EVERY morning, the Filipino farmer wakes up before dawn to till soil that yields a bounty their own family can barely afford to put on the table.

It’s 2026, and yet seven out of every 10 Filipino farmers still do not own the land they cultivate. The country dedicates vast tracts of our fertile land to lucrative cash crops destined for foreign shores, yet ordinary citizens are left to bear the brunt of overpriced, imported rice at the public market.

It is a cruel, daily irony.

We are cultivating the very crops we will never eat, while begging the global market for the food we actually need to survive.

When we ask why the cost of living is so suffocating, the official response usually points to external factors: the lingering effects of a pandemic, the US-Israel-backed war in the Middle East, or the worsening impacts of climate change. These explanations are not entirely wrong, but they are merely symptoms — symptoms of the root problem that has been rotting our nation to the core.

The crux of the actual disease — the root of our woes — is the historical and systemic structure of the Philippine economy itself. 

We have been trapped in an import-dependent, export-oriented framework that has stunted our national growth for over half a century.

This structure has ensured that we remain a nation that consumes what it does not produce, and produces what it does not consume.

We do not need to look far to see this macroeconomic tragedy play out. 

Take a walk through Cagayan de Oro’s urban poor communities, specifically around the chaotic margins of Cogon Public Market. You will see people driving trisikads, pushing karitons with bearings for wheels, or selling cheap, imported knock-offs. Most of these people were once farmers from our own hinterland barangays — villages like Dansolihon or Besigan.

They were driven off their land not just by localized poverty, but by a national policy that made it cheaper to import rice from Vietnam than to support local agriculture. Now, living on the margins of the city, they are the first to starve when a war in the Middle East spikes the price of crude oil, instantly inflating the cost of the very food they once knew how to grow.

Consider the dynamic beyond agriculture.

We export our raw natural resources at bargain prices, only to import them back as expensive finished goods. We have a highly skilled, resilient workforce, yet our most famous “export” is the labor of our own people. The reliance on remittances is hailed as heroic, but it is ultimately a testament to our nation’s failure to build a domestic economy that can utilize Filipino talent and skill at home.

How did we arrive at this state of chronic dependency? This design was not accidental; it is a legacy of colonial rule and deeply flawed post-colonial policy.

Colonial blueprint

The blueprint was drawn by our colonizers. Spain utilized the archipelago primarily as a sourcing hub for raw materials like tobacco, abaca, and sugar, during the Galleon Trades (1565 to 1815) with zero interest in developing a local industry.

And the Americans perfected this model. Following “independence” in 1946, the United States imposed the Bell Trade Act, demanding “parity rights.” This humiliating provision granted American corporations equal rights to exploit our natural resources. It ensured the country remained a captive market for American manufactured goods while cementing our role as a supplier of raw agricultural commodities.

We were practically forbidden from industrializing in any way that might compete with foreign interests.

Era of dictated structure

In the decades that followed, we had a brief window to change course through Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), which sparked some robust manufacturing growth in the 1950s.

But this trend was reversed, particularly during the term of our sitting President’s father, brought on by structural adjustment loans from the Bretton Woods Institutions — more popularly known as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

These international financial institutions demanded that the Philippines dismantle protections for domestic industry in favor of Export-Oriented Industrialization (EOI). This effectively shifted our country toward low-value “export processing zones,” assembling semiconductors or garments from imported parts, while letting our actual domestic manufacturing base shrivel.

We were promised this brand of globalization would lift us up, with catchy blurbs like “NIC-hood” or moving towards a “Newly Industrialized Country.”

Instead, it forged our role at the bottom of the global value chain.

The deregulation that followed in the 1990s, particularly the liberalization of agriculture upon joining the World Trade Organization, was the final straw. It flooded our markets with cheap imports, devastating local farming communities who simply could not compete with heavily subsidized foreign crops.

Genuine national industrialization

Today, we are feeling the culmination of this historical design.

Because we don’t manufacture our own basic necessities, we import foreign inflation.

Because we lack food sovereignty, a war in the Middle East directly spikes the cost of our daily transport and basic goods.

Because we don't have our own foundational industries, we cannot build high-paying domestic jobs.

Complacency is our enemy.

I am not calling to isolate the Philippines from the rest of the world like what Japan did during the Edo period (1639 to 1853). We can participate in the global market, but we must do so from a position of strength, not perpetual dependency.

To break these chains, we need a complete pivot in national economic strategy toward genuine national industrialization. We must have the political will to protect and aggressively incentivize key domestic industries, processing our own raw materials into finished goods right here.

And most importantly, agriculture must be treated as the cornerstone of our development, aiming for self-sufficiency first, and exports second.

We must embrace the fact that we are an agricultural, archipelagic country. There is nothing wrong with that.

Just look at our neighbors in Southeast Asia. Many of the leaders who drove their agricultural development were trained right here in Cagayan de Oro, for chrissakes.

They trained in upper Carmen, right by Masterson Avenue.

We know it locally as SEARSOLIN. It stands for South East Asia Rural Social Leadership Institute, founded by the avenue’s namesake — Fr. William F. Masterson, SJ — in the '60s. As for rice science, the country hosts the “world’s premier research organization dedicated to rice science” based in Los Baños, Laguna.

Our ASEAN neighbors have robust rice production because they studied here.

Without genuine political will, we will never maximize these brilliant scientists and institutions to push forward our independence in the global market. Just look at our neighboring nations that maximized these institutions and whizzed by ahead of us in a span of just a decade or two.

Only when we manufacture what we need and grow what we consume can we finally harvest a future that belongs to us.