By
BERNARDO M. VILLEGAS
December
19, 2011, 12:16am
Disclaimer: This is a repost. To view the original article, click here.
MANILA, Philippines — As my small contribution
to celebrating the 150th birth anniversary of our National Hero Jose Rizal, let
me speculate on what could have happened if he had not been executed on
December 30, 1896 and had lived long enough to influence the development
policies adopted by the American regime in the first three decades of the
twentieth century.
Revealing my bias for rural and
agricultural development, I would venture to say that he would have been very
active in bringing development to the small farmers and to the rural dwellers.
We would have avoided the lack of inclusive growth (to use today's parlance)
and the technological dualism in which advanced technology was employed in the
large plantations for export-oriented crops while the rest of the agricultural
sector (especially rice, corn and coconut) stagnated at the carabao-and-plow
stage.
On what do I base this speculation? First,
on my personal knowledge of the history of the Rizal family. From childhood, I
had always heard of how the Rizal family was very much involved in farming and
trading of agricultural commodities. The eldest brother of my mother, Bernabe,
married a daughter of Soledad, the youngest sister of Rizal. My maternal
grandfather, General Miguel Malvar, was a close business associate of the Rizal
family in a number of agricultural undertakings.
As I had written several times in this
newspaper, Miguel Malvar was a consummate farmer before the revolution and
after the revolution. After he surrendered to the Americans in 1901, he spent
the rest of his life developing orchards in the Sto. Tomas, Batangas and
Calamba areas. One of the orange varieties for which Batangas was famous until
a blight destroyed the industry was named after my grandfather. I had always
heard of the great interest of Jose Rizal in agricultural endeavors.
That is why I am not surprised that the
newest and thoroughly researched book on Jose Rizal just published in 2010 by
Luis Lisa and Javier de Pedro, entitled Romance and Revolution, showed
documentary evidence of the passion that Rizal had for agriculture. The book is
a "look into the lives and times of Jose Rizal and Josephine
Bracken", exploding all sorts of myths about the British girl that Rizal
married.
For those interested they will find all
the strongest evidences from original documents that the authors found in
Barcelona and Hong Kong that, contrary to calumnies that have circulated like
urban legends for decades, Josephine Bracken was not a mistress of her adopted
father nor a bar girl nor a spy of the friars. The book also mustered
sufficiently strong evidences that Rizal married Josephine before he was
executed and that she was recognized as "Rizal's widow" by both
members of the Rizal family and the revolutionaries after the death of Rizal.
But I am digressing from my original intention to write this essay.
On page 124 of the book Romance and
Revolution, we can read a testimony to Rizal's penchant for agriculture which
reached a peak during his four years of exile in Dapitan. Let me quote:
"The most compelling proof that Rizal wished to stay in Dapitan with
Josephine was his immediate purchase of a piece of land in a barrio in Dapitan.
He rhapsodized on his new acquisition trying to lure his mother and father to
come south. In one of his Letters to the Family, dated January 15, 1896, Rizal
wrote: "I bought here a piece of land close to a river that reminds me
much of one of Kalamba but broader and with greater and more transparent flow
of water.
How much it reminds me of Kalamba! The
land has 6,000 plants of abaca and if father and other would like to come here,
I will build a big house for us to live together until we die. I'll convince
father to come, and by my side he will always be cheerful. My beautiful
property is towards the interior, separated from the sea for around half an
hour walk. The place is truly scenic and the land very fertile. Aside from the
abacas, there is enough space to plant 2 cavans of maize. Gradually we could
buy the surrounding lands. There is plenty of dalag (fresh water fish), pako
(edible ferns) and small rounded stones: The river bed is all pebbles."
Unfortunately, this dream of Jose Rizal
never came true because shortly after he wrote this letter, the Spanish
authorities tried to send him back to Spain and then summarily recalled him to
Manila in order to face the charge of rebellion which culminated in his
execution at what is now the Luneta. If things had turned out otherwise and his
"agribusiness plan" had been realized, Rizal could have been, like
the King of Thailand, a rallying point for agricultural development.
His creating another "Kalamba"
in very primitive Dapitan would have been a model of the development of
Mindanao. Through Rizal's example, inclusive growth would have been more
possible in the decades that followed. Farming would have been the choice of
more people from the middle class instead of being considered a lowly
occupation. The State would have devoted more resources to building
farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities and other
infrastructures direly needed by the small farmers to be more productive.
Rizal would have become a hero in another
way: Redeeming the rural folks from abject poverty. He would have been true to
the name adopted by his family whose real surname was Mercado but who added the
name Rizal at the suggestion of a provincial governor who was a family friend.
As Leon Maria Guerrero wrote in his biography of Jose Rizal entitled "The
First Filipino," "Rizal" in Spanish means a field where wheat,
cut while still green, sprouts again.
If our leaders had committed themselves to
creating new "Kalambas" in remote areas like Dapitan very early on in
our development efforts, even the political threats of the muslim rebellion and
the NPA would have not been an insurmountable obstacle to eradicating rural
poverty. The plants that would have been cut while still green would have
sprouted again and again. In fact, true agricultural development would have
actually minimized these political threats since it is poverty that mainly
explains social unrest. For comments, my email address is bernardo.villelgas@uap.asia.