Provincial Notes 2: Sugarcane Economy of Negros Island

I was born, grew up, studied up to high school, in Cadiz City, Negros Occidental. My parents and two siblings are still living there. Cadiz is on the northern most part of Negros Island, which is composed of two provinces, Negros Occidental, predominantly Ilongo speaking and the capital is Bacolod City, and Negros Oriental, Cebuano speaking and the capital is Dumaguete City.

My province is known for huge sugarcane plantations. As far as the eyes can see, one can see sugar plantation from the seaside to the foot -- sometimes up to 1/3 -- of mountains. Our house, like most houses in the province, is just beside a sugarcane farm. When we were young, if we needed to munch sugarcane, we just enter any part of a farm and get any type, any size, of a sugarcane. Or we would hunt spiders there. Life was cool.

Below is the new Silay-Bacolod airport. Silay is actually two cities away from Bacolod and the airport is built on a previously sugarcane farm. So when you land at, or take off from the airport, one will see wide sugarcane plots around it. Mt. Silay can also be seen from the airport terminal.

More photos of sugarcane farms below. At harvest time, when the soil is soft and muddy and the trucks cannot go in the middle of the farm, carabaos (water buffalo) would haul the sugarcane to a nearby road where the trucks are waiting.

Trucks that carry the sugarcane to a sugar milling company are usually large. While the most common trucks are still six-wheelers, many trucks now have 10 or 18 wheels. So one can imagine the heavy burden on public roads.

When the farms are prepared for another cycle of planting. Tractors are used to till the soil. Soil erosion is heavy in sugarcane farms because the soil is tilled yearly, and those tractors plow about 1 foot high of soil.

I'm not in the mood to inject numbers and statistics about the sugarcane economy, I just showed photos here. It's deja vu for me whenever I come home to visit my old and sickly parents. I like to sit in front of a car or a bus whenever I travel from Bacolod to Cadiz and back. The sight of those wide sugar plantations, something I cannot see anywhere in the Philippines, or in many other Asian cities or American cities that I have visited so far.

* See also Provincial notes 1: Negros Occidental, April 25, 2011

Provincial notes 1: Negros Occidental

(Note: I wrote this in my now inactive travel blog, http:travelpinoy.blogspot.com, last August 8, 2006. The photos I just added today)

Negros Occidental is the Philippines' 3rd or 4th most populous province outside of Metro Manila. And while many of the 80 provinces in the country do not have a single city yet, Negros Occ. has 13 cities.

The province is generally flat, but 2 huge mountains can be seen from a distance, especially from a plane preparing to land in Bacolod airport -- Mt. Silay on the left and Mt. Kanlaon on the right. Mt. Silay is an old volcanic formation that has remained inactive. It has a number of summits, which are bounded by many cities in the northern part of the province – the cities of Silay, Victorias, Manapla, Cadiz and Sagay. Mt. Kanlaon on the other hand, is an active volcano and communities and villages on its foot are occasionally threatened with forced evacuations whenever the volcano is rumbling. The mountain’s summit is bounded by a number of cities and municipalities of the 2 neighboring provinces of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental.

(Photocredits: Mt. Silay, http://www.oocities.org/siba_ph/Silay2.html; Mt. Kanlaon, http://www.travelphilippinesnow.com/tag/mount-kanlaon)

Sugarcane plantations make the 2 provinces look green from above, especially from a plane. To unfamiliar eyes, those sugarcane plantations look like the wide rice plantations in Central Luzon and Cagayan Valley regions in mainland Luzon.

Until about 3 years ago, you will seldom see idle lands. Something like if you travel 70 kms. north of Bacolod, passing by the cities of Talisay, Silay, EB Magallona, Victorias, Manapla, Cadiz, and Sagay, the chances that you will see idle lands of at least half an hectare area for every 5 kms. was about 3%. That is, for every 5,000 meters say on the right side of the road, there are about 150 meters combined length of idle lands. Now, you'll see idle lands of about 5-7% for every 5kms. This might seem a near-doubling of idle lands, but compared to other provinces, in fact to all 79 other provinces, Negros Occidental still has the most optimal land use (or the least hectarage of idle lands).

Idle lands develop through a series of land conversion: originally from forest land to sugarcane land, to vegetable farms and fruit orchard, to temporarily idle lands, later to residential or commercial lands. With the on-going construction of an international airport in Silay City (about 16 kms. north of the current airport in Bacolod), plus the emergence of high-end real estate projects developed by Ayala Land in Talisay and Silay, speculation for more real estate projects in surrounding areas is higher.

Roads from Bacolod northwards are generally in bad shape. The main culprit are the hundreds of heavy trucks that carry sugarcane to various sugar milling companies. Among the biggest are Victorias Milling Co. (VMC) in Victorias City, and Philippine-Hawaiian Sugar Milling Co. in Silay City. A six-wheeler truck could be carrying around 12 metric tons (MT) of sugarcane + truck body weight of at least 2-3 tons. Ten-wheeler trucks could be carrying around 20+ MT sugarcane + their body weight, while haulers, those 18-wheeler long trucks could carry some 30 MT+ of sugarcane + their body weight.
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Addendum: April 25, 2011

I thought of re-posting this as a follow up to my earlier article, Back to our roots.

In relation to agrarian reform program in this country, or the forced land redistribution with no timetable, the sugar plantations in Negros and a few other provinces are perhaps the clear example that medium- to large-scale farming are often more preferable to micro- or small-scale farming of one hectare or less. Land cultivation and preparation for the next cropping are done by big tractors and machines, not carabaos (water buffalo) or hand tractors, increasing the pace of planting while reducing the cost of production.

I say "land redistribution with no timetable" because while forced land reform in Taiwan, Japan and S. Korea were successfully implemented in just 1 to 3 years many decades ago, agrarian or land reform in the Philippines is now almost 40 years, counting only from former President Marcos' PD 27 or land reform law in 1972, and no definite timetable yet of when it will finally be stopped and closed.