The death knell for the sugar industry had long been sounded, about half a century ago, 49 years to be exact, by former President Corazon Aquino who was then buoyed by overwhelming public sentiment as the restorer of democracy and brought to power through years of collusion by her husband with the Communist Party of the Philippines (now a designated terrorist group), a long-term alliance between strange bedfellows that came to light only in recent years when the Internet broke the information monopoly by the Aquino’s favored media owners.
It needs to be pointed out, too, that the early Cory Aquino government was heavily influenced by Leftists, at least those we thought were open and ‘legal’ ones, who have long carried a grudge against the sugar industry.
To the legal and underground Left, the sugarcane planters representesd the big landlords – the mga agalon mayduta who are one of the three fundamental ills of Philippine society.
The trio of evils to Philippine society was proounded by self-styled Philippine revolution founder Jose Maria Sison who had long been anticipated by maggots and has long made his reunion with them.
It was Sison who painted the industry black, attributing all the misfortunes of the “poor and oppressed” lot in Negros to the industry that was actually the first industry in the island in the 19th century, and perhaps one of the first in the Philippines.
I had the chance to talk last week to sugarcane planter David Andrew Sanson, a high school classmate at the University of St La Salle who is now acting representative of sugar producers in the Philippine Sugar Board, and that inteeview shone freah light on heretofore prospects and opportunities for the industry upon which Negros is built.
“We were long told that our sunset years have arrived but the industry was resilient,” Dave pointed out as he admitted that his family did try diversifying to prawn farming and other crops like monggo and ramie but the market was different for sugar as a cash crop.
Too, it must be told that the industry had been suffering bad press especially during the Marcos I administration when planters were painted as the worst violators of labor standards for the measly wages seasonal workers or sacadas received.
Another genesis of this hate for the industry is what American history books written by American authors later blamed on sugarcane planters: that the money used to buy votes for the first Marcos to win his party’s nomination came from them.