Epilogue

Across the sun-drenched square, the pale spinster In her lily dress, Spanish veil and golden girdle Traipses with a train of three tanned servant girls Sweating in coarse clothes of heavy yellow
Jose Ma. Sison, Prison and Beyond:
Selected Poems, 1958-1983 (1984)

Three and a half years of Japanese occupation left the Philippine sugar industry in ruins. Almost all the archipelago's centrals became inoperable, either through wartime destruction or for want of spare parts. Elsewhere in Japan's new economic empire Java and Taiwan produced sugar in cheap abundance, and the military administration in the Philippines lacked the incentive and expertise to maintain insular production at prewar levels. Instead, the Japanese unsuccessfully sought to convert sugar fields to cotton and to manufacture molasses into alcohol for fuel. Sugar exports ceased, and local stocks eventually depleted to the point where the government had to introduce rationing. During the first postwar crop year of 1945-46, only five mills functioned, turning out just 11,000 tons of sugar.

Wartime disruptions dispersed Filipino sugar farmers, workers, and administrators, while American staff mostly languished in prison camps. In Pampanga and southern Tarlac, landlords fled to provincial towns or to Manila to weather the hard times and relinquished the countryside to peasants and to the newly formed guerrilla organization Hukbalahap (People's Anti-Japanese Army) with members drawn mainly from the ranks of the prewar AMT. The Huks, besides fighting the Japanese, provided local government, and in 1945 American troops returning to central Luzon found many municipal halls in Huk hands. In Negros some looting of haciendas and field burnings occurred at the beginning of the occupation, but eventually life settled down to a routine of surviving the hardships and scarcities created by war and ineffective Japanese governance. The majority of local planters waited out those harsh times in town centers, although a few stayed on their estates. Farmworkers temporarily planted corn and

palay on sugar land, and returning hacenderos in 1945 faced a shortage of cane points when they went to put in their next crop.^[1]

Despite the turmoil and damage to property, the industry's social order remained intact. Hacenderos and millers divided their allegiance between the old commonwealth government and the new occupation regime and thus assured themselves and their families of considerate treatment by the eventual winner. Those who resided near the plazas either cooperated with the Japanese in running the local government, passively acquiesced to their authority, or provided covert aid to the guerrilla opposition that held the rural areas. Among those who served the occupation were Negros governors Antonio Lizares and Vicente Gustilo, local director of the collaborationist Kalibapi political organization Oscar Ledesma, Bacolod mayor Alfredo Yulo, and president of the Federation of Planters' Associations Ildefonso Coscolluela. At the same time the Free Negros Government functioned in unoccupied territory, providing logistical support to civilians and military units and collecting intelligence for Allied forces. Governor Alfredo Montelibano headed the civilian branch, assisted by such deputies as Tranquilino Valderrama, Aurelio Locsin, Salvador Benedicto, and Miguel Gatuslao. Participants in his administration included propagandist Soledad Locsin and intelligence head Roberto Benedicto, a USAFFE (U.S. Army Forces in the Far East) officer who escaped Japanese confinement. When the war ended planters and millers resumed their traditional social roles.^[2]

Members of sugar's top echelon likewise split their political loyalties. They, too, sought the survival of their class, as Nick Joaquin has suggested, by preventing any other group from assuming power during this period of instability. Under Japanese aegis Jose Yulo served as chief justice, Rafael Alunan as commissioner of agriculture and commerce, and Benigno Aquino successively as commissioner of interior, director general of the Kalibapi, and speaker of the assembly of the Second (Occupation) Republic. Meanwhile, Joaquin Elizalde continued to act as resident commissioner for the commonwealth government-in-exile in Washington. Some leading figures of the prewar sugar struggles did not outlast the occupation—an AMT strike force assassinated Pasudeco executive Jose Tapia in early 1942, and both Quezon and Pedro Abad Santos died of natural causes in 1944—but enough others, including Sotero Baluyut, survived to pick up their old roles once hostilities ceased.^[3]

Post-World War II events in Philippine sugar history have seemed at times like little more than a replay of prewar scenarios. The major spark for post-1946 industry recovery came from a revised American trade policy that reversed the patterns of the Jones-Costigan and Tydings-McDuffie

acts. Passed with the advice of High Commissioner Paul McNutt, PSA spokesman Harry Hawes, and Resident Commissioner Carlos P. Romulo, the Bell Trade Act of 1946 restored privileged Philippine access to the American market until 1954. Despite the protestations of some Filipino nationalists and a few Americans like former high commissioner Frances Sayre, the Philippines reverted to its old dependency on the American market. The price of this dependency was high, for the new nation had to offer economic and currency exchange concessions to the United States, including the stipulation that American entrepreneurs had the same access as their Filipino counterparts to the development of the archipelago's natural resources and to the operation of its public utilities—the notorious parity clause. However, the sugar industry benefited from the Bell Act, and, with further governmental and U.S. rehabilitation funds, revived.^[4] Exports progressed first to, and then above, prewar levels (see table 19).

Other prewar economic patterns revived as well. The movement toward consolidation in the milling sector that began in the 1930s hastened after the war when only twenty-five of the prewar forty-six centrals were refurbished; furthermore, none of the smaller, less efficient factories went back into production. However, many of the same families and companies that controlled plants in the 1930s—the Elizaldes, Lopezes, Aranetas, Montillas, Roxases of Batangas, Ossorios, and Tabacalera among others—retained their domination following 1946. The trend toward Filipinization of milling also continued. Jose Yulo finally acquired Canlubang in 1948, the Lopezes bought Pasumil, the Cojuangcos purchased Central Azucarera de Tarlac, and the Ledesmas obtained San Carlos in 1957. Only Silay-Hawaiian, Central Bais (Negros Oriental), and Central San Pedro (Batangas) remained predominantly in foreign hands. PSA, rejuvenated under the leadership of Yulo, Manuel Elizalde, and Ernesto Escaler, reopened its Washington office to lobby for favored treatment for Philippine sugar.^[5]

For planters and millers the issue of wartime collaboration faded rapidly in the face of renewed prosperity, and those who had supported the Japanese found themselves hastily and quietly rehabilitated. Jose Yulo, for example, went on to run, though unsuccessfully, for vice-president in 1953 and for president in 1957. By the early 1950s the leadership of the major planter organization, the National Federation of Sugar Planters, included individuals who had served both sides during the conflict: Oscar Ledesma as president, Alfredo Montelibano as first vice-president, and Ildefonso Coscolluela and Alfredo Yulo as members of the board. Candidates from the sugar bloc once more sought and filled offices at the provincial and national levels, and the industry and its future prosperity seemed assured^[6]

For workers in the industry old patterns resumed also, and duma'an and casamac again found themselves poverty-stricken. Neither field hands in Pampanga nor those in Negros possessed a champion with sufficient clout to improve their state against the opposition of hacenderos and centralistas. The Huk organization, reborn as the People's Liberation Army in the late 1940s and early 1950s, tragically failed to gain social and economic change in favor of the poor, primarily because of the government's armed suppression of the movement, with American military assistance. Taruc, Alejandrino, Liwanag, and others ended up serving long prison terms. The Huks may have lost, but ideas of equity and social justice, born in the barrios of central Luzon and forwarded by Abad Santos and his disciples, remained in the thoughts and aspirations of poor Capampangan. Old Huk cadre who survived the struggles and escaped imprisonment returned to their communities, where they kept alive the spirit of reform and economic justice

The Huks never had any strong impact outside their central Luzon heartland, especially not in the sugarlands of the western Visayas. Huk leader Guillermo Capadocia was killed in his failed attempt to bring revolt to his destitute home province of Antique whence came so many of the Negros sacadas. Jose Nava joined the movement in 1949 but failed to convert the Panay peasants to the cause, and he died in prison in 1954.^[7]

The duma'an of Negros remained nonmilitant and, as always, relied on planter largesse, even though the sugar elite and its political minions, in the absence of strong pressure, never volunteered meaningful social or economic concessions. The Philippine Congress passed the Sugar Act of 1952 in an effort to provide sugar workers with a share of the proceeds from the annual milling. However, lawyers for the putatively progressive Victorias Milling Company managed to tie up enforcement of the bill in the courts for many years, despite the efforts of a new union, the Federation of Free Farmers, and others to put it into effect.^[8] Exploited Negros laborers thus realized no improvement in their working conditions, even as the industry experienced, beginning in 1956, its greatest prosperity since the 1920s.

The Laurel-Langley Act extended from 1956 to 1974 the privileged access of Philippine sugar to the American market; furthermore, the elimination of Cuba from that market in the early 1960s led to a gradual increase in the Philippine quota, from 889,000 metric tons in 1962 to a high of 1,451,402 in 1974.^[9] Philippine hacenderos and millers responded to the improved commercial opportunities, as they had in the 1920s, by vastly expanding their production capacity. Cane hectarage rose from 206,672 in the 1959-60 crop season to 544,579 in 1975-76. Planters converted land devoted to other crops, including rice, to sugar, extended their cultivation onto hillsides, and even leveled mountaintops for additional fields. As a consequence of the farming of this more marginal land, overall productivity, already one of the lowest in the sugar world, fell some 14.9 percent, from 62.04 metric tons of cane per hectare to 52.8.^[10]

Milling capacity expanded with the addition of nineteen centrals between 1964 and 1978. These new plants, built with Japanese, West German, British, and French equipment, were often financed through foreign loans guaranteed by the Philippine government. Many of these factories went up in nontraditional sugar areas, including the Bicol region of southern Luzon, the Cagayan Valley of northern Luzon, and Mindanao, and all required the conversion of surrounding agricultural property to cane fields.^[11] The industry reached its production zenith during the 1975-76 season, when more land came under sugar cultivation and more sugar was produced than in any other year in the archipelago's history.

During this time evidence of sugar-induced prosperity appeared most visibly in the suburbs of Bacolod and Manila, where planters and millers resided in well-staffed, splendid dwellings, often with swimming pools and attractive gardens. New automobiles, foreign education for their children, and travel abroad continued as the sugarmen's favorite luxuries. A casual walk through downtown Bacolod at this time revealed that the city had spruced up its central plaza and that merchants in the local shops thrived on their commerce with hacenderos. In Pampanga the proliferation of housing subdivisions revealed improved economic conditions; however, much of the profit from sugar found its way into urban real estate in Metro Manila.^[12]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, even as hacenderos and millers enjoyed their improved lifestyle, writers rediscovered the plight of sugar workers, especially those in Negros. After a hiatus of some three decades, numerous articles and studies appeared exposing the deep poverty and malnutrition of those who labored in the cane fields. In many ways these works only updated the exposes of the 1930s. Motivated by the liberal ideas of Vatican II, contemporary Philippine Catholic clergy and laymen such as planter and prewar politician Jose Locsin played an important role in producing this new literature, which urged sugarmen to share more of the industry's profits with their laborers. The widening gap between rich and poor, no doubt, served as an immediate stimulus for these writers, as did such incidents as planters' brutal displacement of peasants from their marginal hillside farms in Cadiz.^[13]

Ironically, the most highly publicized and cited essay, "The Sacadas of Sugarland," by Arsenio Jesena, S.J., concerned a group whose days were numbered. By the mid-1970s the labor force on Negros was becoming so large that planters did not have to seek harvest workers from other islands, since gangs of Negrenses now accomplished most of the cane cutting and loading formerly done by the visiting sacadas. Rapid population growth in the postwar years assured planters in Negros, as well as in Pampanga and southern Tarlac, of a more than abundant supply of year-round labor (see table 20). In both sugar regions there now existed an underclass of field hands who moved about in search of temporary employment. These workers enjoyed no economic security and sometimes competed with tenants and hacienda hands for the more permanent positions.^[14]

Conditions for all participants in the sugar industry worsened considerably after 1975, and business has remained depressed since then. In 1974 the Laurel-Langley Act ended, and the Philippines lost its privileged niche in an American market that since World War II had granted its suppliers 1-4 cents a pound above the world price. The international market, plagued

by oversupply, offered Filipinos no regular customers. In just the five years from 1975 to 1980 sugar's percentage of the nation's total exports dropped from 25 to 11 percent. International agreements among sugar exporters to regulate the market have failed noticeably, and only recently has the United States given the Philippines a quota, one too small to return health to the industry.^[15]

Philippine sugarmen might have sustained a higher level of profitability after 1974, despite the loss of their prime market, for world sugar prices sometimes rose considerably above the Philippine production cost of 13 cents a pound; however, government interference further damaged the industry. Ferdinand Marcos employed the powers of his martial law regime to curb the political independence of the sugar bloc, a feat Manuel Quezon never entirely accomplished. Marcos immediately stripped away many of the assets of the family of his former vice-president and leading sugar baron Fernando Lopez and placed in solitary confinement Senator Benigno Aquino, Jr., from the prominent Tarlac sugar family. As time passed, Marcos, with the aid of his crony henchman Roberto Benedicto, extended his sway over the industry by controlling both the international marketing of Philippine sugar and the flow of agricultural credit.

In 1974 Marcos formed the Philippine Exchange Company (Philex) and later the National Sugar Trading Corporation (Nasutra), headed by Benedicto, which purchased all milled sugar, sold it abroad, and paid planters and centrals from those proceeds. These agencies, especially the latter, determined the rate of reimbursement, and sugarmen never knew exactly to whom and at what price their product had been sold. They not only

resented the loss of control over these sales, they also realized that major discrepancies existed between the sale price and their reimbursement. Even worse, however, the government traders proved incompetent. For example, just as the U.S. quota ended in 1974, unusual circumstances forced the world price of raw sugar to an all-time peak of 65 cents a pound, but agency dealers chose to hold some of their export back and later had to sell it at a much reduced price. Sugar never again reached such a high, fluctuating between 23 cents in 1979 and 4 cents in 1984, settling at about 8 cents. While many of Nasutra's dealings were shrouded in mystery, hacenderos suspected that the agency never obtained the best prices and, through both speculation and peculation, hurt them badly.^[16]

Complaints against Nasutra, however, remained muted, because the government held a lock on agricultural credit, both through the PNB and the newly formed Republic Planter's Bank, headed by the ubiquitous Benedicto. As the sugar industry came upon bad times beginning in the late 1970s, farm debt increased substantially; still, many planters in the 1980s, like those before them, lived lavishly and carried big loans that kept their farms in bondage to the banks. Those hacenderos who chose to contest Nasutra's hold over sugar marketing—many of whom belonged to the New Alliance of Sugar Producers—found few of their colleagues willing to join them for fear of foreclosure.^[17]

A curious throwback to the 1920s has also appeared in the past decade, when many of the recently constructed mills went into receivership to PNB. Again bank centrals have become a government and industry problem; however, on this occasion the administration has taken the more drastic step of decommissioning several of them. Most older centrals have continued in operation, although in the mid-1980s Pasumil and Talisay had to close at least temporarily. Almost all planters have finally won their sixty-forty split, or better, but low prices of sugar have dimmed the glow of this victory. Hacenderos who wish to continue farming must discover ways to reduce their cost of production, as the millers have always suggested. Mechanization of field work to force down labor costs seems like an inevitable step in the quest for survival.^[18]

External signs of worsening conditions in sugarlandia began to appear inexorably after 1975, and by 1982 the plaza of Bacolod and the buildings surrounding it looked dilapidated, while refugees from the countryside begged in the streets for money to feed their families. Judging from available studies, western Negros has fared worse financially than Pampanga and has become to the world press corps the paramount symbol of Philippine poverty and economic stagnation.^[19]

Central Luzon has seemingly survived better for reasons geographical and historical. Since World War II and for the first time in the modern era, the population of Pampanga and southern Tarlac has grown faster than that of Negros, reflecting the former region's greater attachment to the Manila urban complex. Capampangan migrate or commute to the city and send remittances to their families; in addition, many work abroad, in Guam and the Middle East, for example. Evidence of the higher wages they earn overseas can be observed in the rising number of cinderblock houses they build in rural Pampanga upon their return. As the future prosperity of the Capampangan remains linked to access to a larger world, their reliance on the sugar industry declines.^[20]

Because the more independent casamac have few bank loans and low production costs, they have been able to convert from sugar to rice farming and thus avoid the crisis of depressed sugar prices. Furthermore, under the land reform legislation of the martial law years, tenants could purchase from landlords only rice and corn land; hence, many tenants in central Luzon acquired ownership of parcels of rice land from their former owners. The region contains by far the greatest extent of any area in the Philippines converting from large to small, peasant holdings. Plantations still exist in the core of the old sugar area, but the overall expanse of sugarlands has been considerably reduced.^[21]

Retirement of so many landlords from central Luzon has contributed to the success of the land reform. Since World War II, a considerable number of old landholders have preferred the comforts and safety of urban and suburban life, and the continuous presence of radicalism in rural central Luzon has also discouraged them from returning. Although the Huks were defeated in the early 1950s in their attempt to seize national power, they remained a force in the barrios and towns of Pampanga and Tarlac. Eventually, even their local political power waned, in part because of corrupt leadership in the late 1960s; however, in the 1970s a new generation of dissenters belonging to the New People's Army (NPA) replaced them.^[22] Landowners found it more expedient to deal fairly with casamac than to face the threats and hostile acts of the rural rebels.

Without landlords, casamac have become more self-reliant. Perhaps the most advanced example of their independence can be found in western Pampanga, in the area near the old Hacienda Prado, where prewar tenants sought to grow sugar cooperatively. In Barrio Dampe, Floridablanca, a group of former casamac cultivate sugarland they bought with bank help and from which they successfully market cane to Pasumil cooperatively. Samahan Nayon Dampe (Dampe Cooperative) stands as a fitting memorial

to Pedro Abad Santos and his efforts on behalf of the Pampangan peasantry.^[23]

In a yet modest way Capampangan have begun introducing what they have learned about cooperative farming to the Negrenses. Two groups associated with a farming cooperative in San Simon, Pampanga, have started projects in Talisay and La Carlota to teach former sugar hands how to operate as competent smallholders. In Talisay the project is run through First Farmers Human Development Foundation with the encouragement and support of individuals such as Capampangan Edgardo Yap of the Philippine Sugar Association; the one in La Carlota started under the direction of Sister Milagros Dayrit of Asumpta Technical High School in San Simon.^[24] Perhaps through these efforts the separate histories of Pampanga and western Negros will at last meet; however, how fruitful such projects prove remains to be seen.

Change comes far more slowly to western Negros, where the majority of duma'an continue under tight control and labor for paltry wages. Negrense sugar workers lack the skills to switch crops, and planters have offered them only limited opportunities to improve their lot. The NPA has begun making inroads into this province beset by ever-increasing poverty and violence; however, the NPA's greatest influence has come on the southern fringes of sugarlandia, in the Kabankalan area, and even further south, where radicalism traditionally prevailed. In addition to the NPA, a new movement of Christian Communities, encouraged by the liberal wing of the Philippine Catholic Church, has also formed among hill farmers; the Church operates a small central at Dacongcogon for their benefit. In the meantime, in the heartland of Negros the old sugar order holds sway. Armed planters continue to fend off NPA raiders, and the hacenderos threaten—no matter how much poverty surrounds them—to resist, with force if necessary, the efforts of the government to alter the old ways of doing things.^[25]

Kabankalan sits on the the lower boundary of Negros sugar country, but the sugar farms there are mainly small and spread out on the undulating hill amid rice and corn fields. Farmers there do not at all fit the image of the wealthy Negrense hacendero; rather, they appear to suffer as much as do poor Negrense farmhands elsewhere. Because of the extensive poverty, caused in part by the marginality of the farmland, the area surrounding Kabankalan has become a center of unrest. Today the NPA and Christian Communities vie with one another for the allegiance of the inhabitants, and both groups oppose the heavy-handed actions of the Philippine Army.

The post-Marcos era has commenced in the Philippines, and Nasutra has gone the way of other martial law aberrations; however, world economic

conditions have prevented significant recovery for the industry. The U.S. market, too, promises to remain a finite one for Philippine sugar, given pressure from America's own sugar producers, the demands of its other offshore suppliers, and the fact that its biggest food producers, including large bottlers Pepsi and Coca-Cola, now increasingly use corn sweetener in their products. Even if future Philippine sugarmen improve their productivity, they will have to depend for their livelihood on insular consumption and limited exports. The World. Bank reports the industry's export earnings for the present as "stagnant," and there seems little prospect of revival.^[26] However the sugar industry limps along hereafter, many thousands who toiled in the sugar fields will never again work there. More restricted production and mechanization will seriously reduce the labor force, and the poor conditions that have been a fact of life since 1975 will persist.

The successors of President Corazon Aquino, herself the heiress to an immense sugar fortune, now must decide what to do about sugar's future.^[27] Perhaps the export industry has reached its old age and, for economic and social reasons, should give way to some substitute. The presence of so many poverty-stricken workers and a history of so much past misery and repression suggests that only some alternative endeavor will boost the Philippine economy and the well-being of millions of Filipinos.