THE PHILIPPINES: Road to the 20th Century

Only 35 miles from Manila, the Philippine barrio (village) of Santo Nino is a town out of the Middle Ages—without plumbing, electricity or medicine. One cause of Santo Nino’s squalor is its isolation; for centuries its only access to the outside world has been a winding trail over which common folk move on foot, the more prosperous on donkey back. Last week, sweating under the tropical sun, 200 half-naked men and boys from Santo Nino were hacking out a broad, five-mile highway to take out the village’s production of timber, copra and rice, and in return bring in the 20th century.

Santo Nino’s farm-to-market road is part of a quiet revolution in the Philippines’ 24,000 rural villages. Bureaucratically known as PACD (for office of the Presidential Assistant on Community Development) and financed by the U.S. International Cooperation Administration and the Philippine government, the four-year-old village-improvement program shines out in startling contrast to the grubby corruption that has come to dominate Philippine public life once again under the regime of indulgent President Carlos Garcia.

Poll Watcher. At a total cost of $30 million, PACD has raised rice production through village-scaled irrigation projects to as high as 5,000 Ibs. per acre (nearly five times the Philippine average), re-seeded fishermen’s depleted oyster beds, supplied farmers with 10,000 brood sows and helped set up barrio councils to promote self-government. In the process, PACD has made itself the Philippines’ most effective weapon against the still-present Communist-led Hukbalahap guerrillas, whose strength has always rested on the misery of the islands’ 19 million barrio residents.

The man behind PACD is Ramon P. Binamira, 33, who while still at niversity of the Southern Philippines law school organized 30,000 Filipino students into a poll-watching corps whose vigilance contributed notably to the 1953 clean election of the Philippines’ late beloved President Ramon Magsaysay. Once in office, Magsaysay wanted to give Binamira a Cabinet post, but he decided instead to live a while among the barrio people, who constitute the submerged 70% of the Filipino population.

The barrio Binamira chose was a fishing village whose people were starving because commercial trawlers had taken all the fish out of the bay. Binamira led a legal fight to force the trawlers to stay three miles offshore so that the village fishermen in their outriggers would have a chance. He also helped Magsaysay to set up a special office to train idealistic young Filipinos for village service.

A Thin Line. Today some 1,500 young Filipinos work for PACD. The requirements are stiff: out of 100 to apply, only eight pass the written exam, and of these only four, on the average, are selected. To avoid a handout psychology, Binamira gets villagers to contribute up to half the cost of each project, in goods or services. Result: the actual cash spent goes a long way. One village built its own copra-drying plant, used part of the profit to add two classrooms to the local school.

Though many of his henchmen resent PACD’s immunity to political pressure, President Garcia has always kept hands off it, aware that interference with its operations might well mean the end of U.S. aid for the project.* But with a presidential election coming up next year, Garcia already made it plain that he and his Nacionalista Party will claim all possible credit for PACD’s success. Said he last week: “I know PACD is not a political organization, but I’d like to believe the people will show their gratitude.” Binamira—whose own political potential looks great to Manila’s form makers—is too cagey to dispute Garcia’s claims, but he loses no chance to proclaim his opposition to any political interference in PACD. Says he: “Only a thin line separates order from chaos in the rural Philippines. In the hands of a demagogue we’d be lost.”

* Two weeks ago, checking into the Philippine Ministry of Agriculture’s handling of U.S. aid funds earmarked for free fertilizer for peasants, ICA uncovered instances of improper distribution, entered a prompt—though probably vain —demand for repayment of its $3,400,000.