DAVAO CITY—Abaca has not been lost to Davao City, whose big plantations in the early 1900s drew foreign workers, mainly Japanese, to the city.

With the same varieties still present in scattered farms and mostly untilled and untended, the City Agriculture Office has included the crop in its primary agribusiness crops for commercial cultivation.

“We want to revive the abaca industry,” said Leonardo Avila III, city agriculture officer.

Despite being untilled and untended, tribal farmers have turned to the abaca plants for secondary source of income after planting rice and rootcrops, their main livelihood.

“They would go to the hinterlands where the abaca grew in the wild, and strip them of their fiber to be sold to the traders,” he said. “That means that abaca is still a big potential crop that has not been lost.”

Farmers could strip only about 8 kilos a day of fiber using manual stripping. “If we can bring in the technology, we can increase that to 100 kilos a day.”

Chinese-Filipino businessmen here have told Avila that they have been seeking abaca fibers from all  over due to scarce supply. “Many of them would go as far as Davao Oriental to get their supply.”

The abaca that grew here is likely the same varieties grown in plantations in the 1900s and until shortly before the World War II.  The profitability of the abaca hemp has turned certain sections of the city into little Japanese communities, where many Japanese workers sought their fortune.

Avila said  as many as 40,000 hectares were devoted then to abaca. “We have the Daliaon plantation in Toril, where it was literally a plantation. Barangay Manuel Guianga was also the name of the biggest producer of abaca hemp that time.”

Abaca was one of the few crops spared from attacks of field rats that damaged  as many as 3,000 hectares of rice, cacao and coconuts early this year. “I believe we can still bring that profitability from abaca because the global demand for the abaca fiber has continued to grow,” he said.

The shipping industry has gradually discarded the plastic ropes in favor of the abaca hemp on environmental concerns.