In the 1980s as well as in this decade, it has been a source of amusement to read how Manila-based opinion writers would ‘assess’ the situation in the Davao region.
In the first months of his presidency, President Duterte was a favorite topic, as one supposed ‘expert’ after another gave his take on the man; to include his colorful language, his choice of his cabinet, his war on drugs, his anti-Obama tirades, his stand on the South China Sea territorial dispute, his supposed inexperience, his leanings towards China and Russia and lately his declaration of Martial Law.
Now one columnist claims Duterte has actually started another war in another front: this time against the oligarchs.
And that this war has been brought to bear on the owners of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and against the business conglomerate that Antonio Floirendo, a self-made man from Bauang, La Union took 50 years to build as President Duterte himself noted in a speech in Davao del Norte.
Yet according to this columnist, an earth-shaking ‘crucial battle’ is being waged against the Floirendo’s by the Duterte administration with no less than House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez taking the point.
He added: ‘Floirendo has been practically a crony of the past six Presidents starting with Marcos. This is because all past Presidents allowed his huge banana enterprise, the Tagum Agricultural Development Corp. (Tadeco) in Davao del Norte to control for 48 years – nearly half a century – and at atrociously cheap rates some 5,500 hectares of property, which is under, but not owned, by the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor), that is just one of the many bureaus of the justice department. It was crony access to such vast cheap lands and labor that made the company one of the world’s largest banana exporters.”
How the columnist would lump the PDI owners with the Floirendo’s is beyond me. My suspicion is that having arrived at a ‘thesis,” the columnist included the Floirendo’s as a convenient ploy to buttress his assertion.
The insinuation seemed to say that the late Floirendo, Sr. owed his billions to his fellow Ilocano, President Ferdinand E. Marcos under whose term the Tadeco-Bucor agreement was inked.
Floirendo’s timeline suggests otherwise. In fact, it showed from the start a pioneering entrepreneur who built up his business conglomerate through dint of hard work and perseverance. One account has this to say: “Born on Nov. 20, 1915 in Bauang, La Union, Floirendo was among those who saw enormous possibilities in the country’s southern frontier after the war when the administration of President Elpidio Quirino encouraged people from Luzon and the Visayas to explore opportunities in Mindanao.”
The following time-line suggests a pioneering enterpreneur who made the most of opportunities:
February 11, 1947: Antonio Floirendo opened his first company, the Mindanao Motors Corp., which imported of semi-knocked down car and truck parts for distribution in Mindanao. It was no exaggeration to say he brought wheels to Mindanao, which was in most parts largely undeveloped and still to be connected by good roads.
April 14, 1948: Floirendo founded Davao Motor Sales (DAMOSA) and established a Ford Motors reassembly plant at Bankerohan Public Market, the firm’s main office. Damosa by the way remains to this day, as a living testimony as ‘fruit of a good tree.’
1950: Floirendo acquired a 60-hectare land named Nenita Farms at Marapangi, Toril, which was Asia’s largest piggery. At its height, the farm hosted a mind-boggling 25,000 heads of hogs. This purchase alone suggests that Floirendo’s has hit upon his millions and well on the way to making more.
December 20, 1950: Don Antonio registered and incorporated the Tagum Agricultural Development Company, Inc. (TADECO), dubbed by the prestigious Fortune magazine as the “single biggest abaca plantation in the world.”
April 2, 1951: President Elpidio Quirino signed Proclamation No. 247 excluding 1,023.8574 hectares from the Davao Prisons and Penal Farm (DAPECOL) estates in the name of TADECO.
March 18, 1953: Floirendo founded the Panabo Hemp Company, Inc.
February 1, 1956: President Ramon Magsaysay met with Frank Metcalf, vice-president of the Columbian Rope Co. of New York, Merle Robie, vice-president and general manager of Columbian Rope Co. in the Philippines, and Foirendo, president of DAPA at Malacanan. Floirendo informed the President the price of abaca had gone up and suggested the government set aside 50,000 hectares in Davao and Agusan for the exclusive cultivation of hemp. In response, the President promised to take action toward increasing the Philippine abaca production.
May 16, 1956: TADECO, represented by Don Antonio, entered its first contract with the Bureau of Prisons, represented by Director Alfredo Bunye to process excess abaca stalks in the 2,800-hectared DAPECOL plantation. The deal was approved by acting Secretary Catalino Macaraeg.
These pre-Marcos developments showed Floirendo a millionaire many times over by the time the Tadeco-Bureau of Corrections agreement was consummated, an agreement that a succession of administration sustained.
The reference to cheap lands failed to account for the fact that most of the land then was an inhospitable swamp and that it took Floirendo to drain it and to turn it productive.
The reference to cheap labor does not wash either because the legislated labor wage labor from the 1950s upwards amounted to survival wages.
What has not been highlighted is the fact that the Tadeco-BUCOR deal has introduced a new concept of reforming prisoners by making them productive and thus allowing them to earn at the same time while serving their prison terms. Fact is, some of them have chosen not to leave even after having served their terms.
It is a concept that the Iwahig Penal colony in Palawan has copied in part and it explains why in some cases the families of some convicts chose to follow them to Palawan where they could till part of the land while awaiting deliverance.
