Philippine Resettlement: Remaking Political and Environmental Terrains

• In Event: Imperial Imaginings: Land, and Resource Use in Practice in the Pacific and the East China Sea

Abstract

Between 1902 and 1960, the US colonial state and then the Philippine Republic sponsored the migration of Christian Filipinos into areas of the archipelago that were majority non-Christian. The state promised “land for the landless,” to move families from “overpopulated” regions onto empty frontiers, and to develop southern islands like Mindanao and Sulu into a “breadbasket” for the nation. It also used resettlement as a tool for undermining insurgencies against tenancy, debt, and plantation labor, for quelling non-Christians’ unwillingness to farm or be governed in a manner congruent with state dictates, and for pushing peasants away from subsistence agriculture and into commodity production linked to global marketplaces. Philippine frontier landscapes have shifted dramatically as a consequence of these state-sponsored, as well as voluntaristic migrations, onto formerly majority non-Christian spaces in the archipelago. This paper, part of a larger project that examines the political economies of these migrations, will consider the ecological impact of this movement. I will demonstrate that resettlement architects’ priorities, their perceptions of frontier terrains, the programs they helped develop, and their ideas about appropriate farming practices all contributed to an approach to land management that failed to take local knowledge seriously. Instead, they cleared and divided land in an effort to set up what they called “colonies” of smallhold farmers who would use state-mandated seeds and foreswear slash-and-burn farming as conditions of their settlement. This paper will examine the first project of the National Land Settlement Agency in the Koronadal Valley in Cotabato, Philippines in the late 1930s. It will analyze the relationship between its architects’ political economic aims, their concomitant environmental visions, and the ultimately negative ecological impact of their project. It will also explore local people’s as well as settlers’ interventions in and responses to the project and its effect on Philippine space.

Author

• Karen R Miller, LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York (CUNY)