Sugar and Philippine Society, 1836-1920

From its modest origins in the nineteenth century the sugar industry emerged as one of the archipelago's economic giants. In 1920 it represented almost one-third of all Philippine foreign trade; moreover, the industry boasted the islands' most advanced manufacturing technology. For all its economic strength, however, the sugar business was vulnerable, because its prosperity depended largely on world demand and access to the dutyfree U.S. market. While improved milling facilities represented a degree of industrial modernity to the Philippines, they did not stimulate growth of other kinds of processing, save distilling.

Yet the very status achieved by the sugar industry worked to the detriment of other Philippine enterprises. Sugar soaked up much of the private and governmental credit available to local commerce. Further, because of peak harvest labor demands and low field productivity, hacenderos discouraged cultivation of other crops, including important foods, with the result that their activities contributed to the Philippines' becoming a net rice importer from the end of the nineteenth century onward.^[86] Absorption of peasant farms and open lands in northern and western Negros and upper Pampanga did more than add to planter holdings: it destroyed an alternate way of life for sugar workers and tenants.

During Spanish times collaboration between sugar planters and colonial officials served to sanction the political and economic hierarchies of Philippine society. Moreover, patterns of agricultural management on sugar farms as well as the economic gulf between rich and poor profoundly shaped the exercise of political power within society and precluded any real possibility of instituting participatory democracy, despite American efforts to install such a system. Political domination by the elite in Negros and Pampanga was complete; although sugarlandia's politicians had to share power with representatives from other regions, the sugar barons, by virtue of their economic power and size, had their way in important matters of finance at the insular level as well. The stronger the voice sugar interests gained in Manila and Washington, the more dependent they became on colonial support and protection.

Ironically, the very influence planters held with colonial governments sometimes hindered development of their own industry. In the matter of taxation Spaniards never instituted an exaction on agricultural property,

and Americans imposed only a very modest one; instead, both administrations drew their major revenues from monopolies, head taxes, tariffs, and excises that shifted the burden onto others often less able to pay. Even with its modest levy on land, the American regime, rather than foreclose on their properties, allowed tax relief to planters during the early years of crisis. No other group received gentler treatment at colonial hands than did the landholders of sugar country. Accordingly, colonials never raised sufficient revenues to construct good infrastructure that would have aided agriculture and related activities in the two sugar areas and elsewhere in the archipelago.^[87]

The period from 1836 to 1920 encompassed the establishment in the Philippines of a great network of family-owned sugar plantations. At the same time in Java, Hawaii, and Cuba, businessmen formed estates based on large, efficient central mills. In those places agro-industrial corporations directly controlled most of their cane supply, either through ownership or rental of fields. Filipino planters continued far longer as the primary producers of both cane and sugar, preserving for themselves a substantial share of industry-generated returns. When centrals finally arrived in the islands, hacenderos already occupied a protected niche within the industry, and through their milling contracts they persisted as active participants, sharing returns that elsewhere frequently reverted to foreign concerns.

Survival of family-owned and -managed landholdings prolonged traditional socioeconomic patterns in sugarlandia, often to the detriment of its inhabitants. In Pampanga a tenant system scarcely found in commercial crop zones lingered on as a vestige of a peasant economy, as farmers maintained the tenant-landlord pattern of their riverine heartland. Despite the impact of so modernizing a force as the sugar industry, the Capampangan, unable easily to change their methods of production, lost access to more desirable markets until late in the era.

Negrense society reflected its plantation structure. For all the wealth generated there, highways on Negros remained inadequate, central markets barely suitable, and public schools only average. The want of amenities serves as further evidence of the weaker sense of community that characterized frontier Negros. Planters might come together for entertainment and to assist one another in times of crisis, but society as a whole consisted of a series of segmented., producing units. Town centers played a less important role in social life than in Pampanga, and hacienda workers lived a more isolated existence than did casamac in the north.^[88]

In both Negros and Pampanga the chief beneficiaries of the frontier era were the entrepreneurs of sugarlandia who gained wealth, prestige, and influence from their exploitation of rich new lands. Class differentiation

between planters and workers became more pronounced as time passed, and the duma'an of Negros and the casamac of Pampanga found themselves increasingly trapped through debt and low returns in a permanent subsistence condition. As it did elsewhere, the sugar industry enchained Philippine field hands, casamac and duma'an, and left them little recourse against further exploitation.