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HIS eyes
stared upward as he started with that familiar tuneful
articulation about Iloilo at the peak of its grandeur. A
few minutes later, his voice turned wobbly as he recounted
how the province slipped from prominence. “So we lost our
label being the country’s Queen City of the South.”
As wind
rustled into the interior of the Sarabia Manor Hotel’s
convention center, where the first-ever investment forum
in Iloilo took place last month, Oscar M. Lopez, chairman
of the Lopez Group of Companies, recalled how Iloilo was
once a genteel and gracious place of stylish mansions and
staggeringly wealthy sugar barons.
During the
first wave of globalization that swept the world between
1815 and 1914 and the rapid growth of the sugar industry
in the Visayas, Iloilo led the course for the country. By
the last decade of the 19th century, Lopez told the more
than 200 participants of the forum that the province
ranked second to Manila in volume of both export and
import trade. “Sugar accounted for the greater part of
Iloilo’s exports,” he said.
Looking at
an elaborate ceiling, the 77-year-old mogul said Iloilo,
hometown of the Lopez clan, had an atmosphere of
entrepreneurial energy. For instance, the province had the
first Asian airline, Iloilo-Negros Air Express Co.,
predating Philippine Airlines, Japan Airlines and
Singapore Airlines in the 1930s.
Such
advancements awed foreigners. Sir John Bowring, a former
British governor of Hong Kong who visited Iloilo in 1858,
was impressed by what he saw. As he put it in his book A
Visit to the Philippines, “[Iloilo] is not only one of the
most numerously peopled; it’s perhaps the most productive
in agricultural and most active in manufacturing
industry.”
Iloilo’s
agriculture, recalled Lopez, was one of the most vastly
flourished in terms of sugar, rice, cotton, tobacco and
indigo, much of which were exported to adjacent islands
and even to Manila.
But the
pride of
Iloilo at the time, really, was its native textile industry, said
an academician. Its estimated 50,000 to 60,000 looms
produced the finest piña, sinamay and abaca cloth.
The latter was exported anywhere around the globe. In 1861
the total exports value of native textile products from
Iloilo
and neighboring provinces was estimated at $1 million.
The
advanced development of the native weaving industry,
according to one American scholar, resulted in the first
substantial urban concentration in Jaro and Molo, both
premier towns in
Iloilo,
and the earliest recorded accumulation of capital among
the emerging elite of these towns.
“One of
the most important factors in the rapid development of the
agricultural and industrial economy of
Iloilo,”
said Lopez, “was the rise of the Chinese mestizo class to
a dominant economic and social position in the Jaro and
Molo areas during the past century.” Their emergence in
the economic scene in Iloilo was mainly the result of
their expulsion in their country. Now, 90 percent of
entrepreneurs in Iloilo are Chinese, a local journalist
said.
Lopez
eventually looked blank. His face, cut in razor-like
lines, was marshmallow-white. “Those were Iloilo’s golden
years,” he said. “Tycoons moved their flags to the
national capital and built newer and larger business
empires there.” He added that as the province lost its
significance as a transshipment port for sugar, and as the
nation’s sugar industry dwindled greatly, so much of its
economic power also fell off to its worst.
No one
dares
THE Iloilo
Economic Development (ILed) Foundation Inc. has identified
roadblocks to Iloilo’s progress: power shortage, excessive
flooding and inaccessibility to the province.
Rex C.
Drilon II, chairman of the ILed Foundation, conceded that
the province has inadequate and unreliable power supply.
That’s why the foundation is now in dialogue with the
Panay Electric Co. for a braced provision of power.
With the
present state of power crisis in Iloilo, Maria Lea
Victoria E. Lara, executive director of the Iloilo
Business Club, said investors eschew from the province.
She remembered wryly: “There was a call center that, after
several weeks of experiencing undependable power supply,
moved its operation out of the city.”
The
foundation, moreover, is backing the Consunji-led DMCI
Holdings Inc., which will build a 100-megawatt (MW)
coal-fired power plant. It plans to purchase a used power
plant from China or India to bank on costs because a new
plant would cost around $120 million to $150 million, but
assembling an old one would cost about 20-percent less.
Also,
Global Business Power Corp., owned by the Ty family of the
Metrobank group, has partnered with Taiwanese firm Formosa
Heavy Industries for the building of a $500-million power
plant using clean coal technology. The new plant in Iloilo
will have a capacity of 164 mw.
Through
these two projects, the number of call centers will
certainly grow as they, in fact, require steady supply of
power for their operations. At present, there are four
call centers (Echo, ePLDT Ventus, GMCI and Callbox) and
two business-process outsourcing providers (Packet Switch
in transcriptions, BrushNetwork in web design and web
graphics) in the province.
Glenn D.
Aguilar, chairman of the Iloilo Federation for Information
Technology, has been convinced that the province can
synergize its work force. The call-center industry in the
province is now filling up 2,000 seats. By 2010, Iloilo
City Mayor Jerry P. Treñas foresees to have more than
5,000 employments in this industry.
Likewise,
the local education sector nurtures about 85,000 students
and degree holders reach as high as 18,000 students. “Our
biggest strength is our academic institutions,” Aguilar
said, referring to Central Philippine University,
University of San Agustin and the University of the
Philippines in the Visayas.
Aguilar,
who is also the chancellor of UP Visayas, believes that
the drift of information technology-enabled services is
toward regional centers. “So we’re now preparing the
locations of this flourishing industry,” he said.
Under
development include the 10-story Iloilo Technopark with
5,000 square meters in each level, the Iloilo Province IT
Building and the 54-hectare old airport that Megaworld
Corp. will develop into a downtown. ILed Foundation’s
Drilon said the latter will supply the business and
visitors’ infrastructure that potential investors will
require.
“My
personal estimate, assuming that Megaworld leaves 30
percent open space and spends P25,000 per square meter of
gross construction area, the locators and investors in the
Megaworld project will need to invest almost P300 billion
in the next 20 years to fully develop the area,” explained
Drilon, who is also the chief operating officer of the
Ortigas & Co. Ltd. partnership.
Through
this Megaworld project, Treñas said it would be easier for
call centers to set up their operations here. “Before,
call-center operators had to build up their own
workplace,” he said. “No one dares to invest in property
development because of the apparent power-supply
troubles.”
Better
sooner
ILOILO,
which is 220 miles south of Manila, needs to rush its
infrastructure development. Many were saying, for example,
that the old airport was so Third World in form and
maintenance that it was a source of discomfiture to
Ilonggos.
Thus,
because of the relentless effort of Sen. Franklin Drilon,
Rex Drilon made sure that the Obusa Fund worth P6.5
billion would be financed properly to the new airport with
international standards. “It was graft-free and was
finished on time, on specs and within budget. Now, it’s
something that we can be proud of,” said Rex Drilon.
One of the
cruxes, on the other hand, that Nathaniel von Einsiedel,
president of Consultants for Comprehensive Environmental
Planning Inc. (Concep), is pushing is the Santa
Barbara-Iloilo Growth Corridor.
He was
referring to the widening of some thoroughfares around the
province that will promote accessibility from rural areas
to the city and vice versa. These include Western Corridor
(Oton-Santa Barbara Road and the Iloilo-Antique Road),
West-Central Corridor (Iloilo-San Miguel Road), Central
Corridor (Iloilo-Pavia-Santa Barbara-Kalibo Road), East-Central Corridor (Iloilo-Leganes-Roxas
Road) and Eastern Corridor (Santa Barbara-Libongcogon Road
and Iloilo Coastal Road).
When all
these corridors are already in place, von Einsiedel is
confident that agribusiness in
Iloilo
will grow vigorously. Winston Conrad B. Padojinog, senior
economist at the University of Asia and the Pacific (UA&P),
said the province is an essential supplier of
agricultural, cattle and fishery products in the Panay
Island.
Padojinog,
who is an Ilonggo, projects that the province will remain
as the primary source of food in the island. Over 60
percent of the island is devoted to agriculture, where
Iloilo has close to 70 percent of its land devoted to crop growing.
Of 80
provinces in the
Philippines,
Iloilo ranks second in mango production and goat
inventory, fourth in palay and duck production, fifth in
chicken, hogs and carabao stocks, and sixth in fish
production.
What
hampers the growth of the industry, according to UA&P’s
Center for Food and Agribusiness executive director
Rolando T. Dy, is the province’s absence of sustaining a
road map.
“Iloilo
needs one. Better sooner than later,” he said.
Dy, who is
also the dean of the school of management at the UA&P,
adds that “the goal of the road-mapping is to craft
strategies—to choose and do the right things. It leads to
effective project or program development and management.”
Sense of
urgency
BECAUSE of
excessive flooding, the foremost alarm is the trouble of
accessing safe water. “We are also having a sense of
urgency to recoup the problem on unreliable water supply,”
said Drilon.
In Iloilo,
nonrevenue water accounts to about 58 percent of the
entire distribution lines where, if converted into an
income-generating base, 61,000 families would be affected.
With this alone, Concep’s von Einsiedel said investment in
this line is worth a gamble, projecting that there will be
37,286 households that will need water connections by
2010.
However,
there’s a crunch. If Metro Iloilo’s 2006 population was
674,500 with a need of about 84,300 cubic meters per day,
there will be a shortfall of 59,330 cubic meters three
years from now, von Einsiedel said.
“As new
developments are pouring in, various housing projects will
magnify demand in the next three to five years,” added von
Einsiedel. By 2010, Metro Iloilo will start exceeding the
aquifer recharge level, which means that reliance on
groundwater as the main source of water alone for Metro
Iloilo will no longer be sustainable at that time.
Take, for
instance, Guimaras’s present shortage of about 13,062
cubic meters per day. More than half, or 104,500, of the
total population consume such an amount of water. The
tendency of the residents in Guimaras is to get water from
“sources unfit for safe domestic use. There’s no proper
accounting of water-production capacities of the sources,”
said von Einsiedel.
He,
therefore, proposed that the local government or the
private sector could conduct a feasibility study on
increasing capacity of groundwater aquifers through
artificial recharge and installation of computerized
groundwater withdrawal. This could be achieved, for one,
through the local government’s exploration on bilateral
grant or through the support of the Asian Development
Bank, he said.
Exploring
other nontraditional water sources, through man-made lakes
or water recycling, could relieve the situation, von
Einsiedel added. “Or encourage companies or development
groups that are heavy users of water to consider water
recycling.”
The main
thing here, after all, is the appreciation of everyone’s
vigilance to act and contribute in bringing back the old
glory of the province. By 2015, everyone is confident that
Iloilo
will be transformed into a premier province or even into a
new kind of economic powerhouse.
“With this
investment forum, we are giving a signal to potential
investors that Iloilo is now ready for the world,” Lopez
said with a candid twinkle in his eyes, slanted, of
course, in an Oriental manner.
He looks
at the audience squarely, scarcely fazed and grinned.
Then, he utters words locking together to make a chant: “I
personally believe that Iloilo City can become the Queen
City of the South once again, which can compete against
all comers for economic primacy. For Iloilo, the best is
yet to be.” |
