‘Across the country through a long life’

To celebrate the end of a long year, my wife and I joined up with part of my family to spend a few days in Davao.

For the Christmas holidays, my family was able to celebrate a face-to-face gathering with cousins and their respective families. Hopefully, two years of isolation from each other because of the pandemic is a thing of the past!

Regional development. Upon arrival in Davao by air, a van drove us through the narrow cemented barangay roads (to avoid the city’s main traffic) and brought us to the marina seafront of our destination resort. There, we awaited a boat that motored us to Samal island where the resort is located.

As the boat moved farther out from Davao’s seafront horizon, the city’s economic advances over the years stood out to me. Amidst the flat lands of agricultural plantations, tall trees and coconut palms and the mountains in the background, I saw specks of high buildings that interrupt a rising spread of commercial and residential roofs.

Davao has grown by leaps and bounds across the decades. The six-year Duterte presidency which concluded recently has added further impetus to that progress.

President Marcos recently announced the signing of documents to begin the construction of a long bridge that will connect Samal Island to Davao. The construction of a bridge from Cebu to Mactan Island in the 1980s not only accelerated Mactan’s rapid progress but also stirred the growth of Metro Cebu. Parallel progress is likely to happen.

Less than six years ago, I made a long road trip by car that began in Manila and which brought me to the heartland of Mindanao’s major cities. In that trip, I had occasion to talk with many local leaders of the island – mayors, provincial governors, businessmen, administrators, technicians and economists.

A highlight of that trip was a one-on-one with Mayor Rodrigo Duterte. At that time, he was contemplating a run for the presidency and he eagerly wanted national exposure on what he had done for Davao.

I wrote several Crossroads columns in The STAR on Mindanao’s progress, including two based on the Duterte interview. I believe that those columns added toward the proper assessment of him as a potential national leader. (My PhilSTAR columns around June, 2015.)

My travels in the country across the decades. As a young man in the 1950s who was born in Pampanga and had lived most of my growing years in Manila, my early travels were northward, always by public bus, toward the northern provinces and to Baguio and the Ilocos. These were trips with other students and friends.

As a professor in the UP economics faculty in the 60s, I traveled extensively in Luzon and also across the islands to attend meetings and to recruit potential promising graduate students.

Then came more than a decade of stint in the government. I happened to join the government as the head of a high Cabinet office – the National Economic Council. In that role, there was a wide latitude for travel within the country and across the islands, which were undertaken mostly by air travel.

When the NEDA was created, and I was appointed to organize it, I continued the same track of travels as in the NEC. In addition, because NEDA became even more mandated to encourage regional economic development, I had to set up the regional mechanisms and institutions to promote the process.

This meant setting up regional economic councils and the corresponding NEDA regional planning offices. This brought me in contact with many provincial officials and city mayors, local leaders and businessmen, and of course government administrators and economists at the local and regional levels.

During the mid-1980s until the 1990s when I worked at the World Bank, I changed focus and occupied my time with international economic development issues. This further enhanced my professional experience. My travels in that position further deepened my experience in economic development work.

The connecting points of our islands. When I returned home to the country to rejoin the UP Economics faculty, I traveled again across the country, to learn more about its modern problems, to track down development issues and to analyze if I could be of help in furthering the agenda of improving the national development future.

My participation in column writing mainly on economic development issues has been an important element of my writing Crossroads in this newspaper.

As a government official, I traveled the nooks, corners, and heartland of the country as part of my duty to understand our problems and to help solve them. I had traveled the reaches of Babuyan in the north, Tawi-Tawi island in the south, Palawan in the west and as far east as Eastern Mindanao at Bislig Bay.

When I returned to the Philippines around the turn of the 2000s, I began to travel again around the country and this time did it by car mainly, overland and across the islands using ro-ro and interisland vessels, always with an experienced driver at the car’s wheel.

Such travels were continuous on the roads, undertaken at a stretch of two to three weeks non-stop and undertaken periodically in stretches of at least one or two times during the year.

These travels became learning adventures in travel and study immersions across the inns and little hotels available on the roads that most business travelers explored the land and sea connections. Eventually, I learned how to link them with appointments to useful officials, people and industries and offices that I passed through on the road with the help of NEDA.

Through these, I learned the links between the major and the smaller islands. Thus, I experienced the road trips between Sorsogon and Samar; between Samar and Leyte; between Leyte and Mindanao; between the central islands of Panay, Negros, and Mindoro; between Cebu, Leyte, Negros, Bohol; and Mindanao; and between Mindoro and Luzon.

In the course of the year 2023 – this new year – I will write more about these travels across the Philippines, commenting on development and business issues as well as regional and urban progress.

A happy new year and a better Philippines to all!

For archives of previous Crossroads essays, go to: https://www.philstar.com/authors/1336383/gerardo-p-sicat. Visit this site for more information, feedback and commentary: http://econ.upd.edu.ph/gpsicat/