National Artist Nick Joaquin, in Culture and History, a book he wrote in 1988, wondered if our mindset for smallness is responsible for our inability to address the growing needs of our people.
The depressing fact in Philippine history, he rued, is what seems to be our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise.
We blame our colonizers for many of our current problems but according to Joaquin, it was the colonial years that “there was actually an advance in freedom, for the unification of the land, the organization of towns and provinces and the influx of new ideas, started our liberation from the rule of the petty, whether of clan, locality or custom.”
I was going through a recent paper of Prof. Jesus Felipe and some economists at the De La Salle University and some of his comments on our Viber thread. Failure of policy, possibly because of small thinking, caused us to lose our status as the second-best economy in Southeast Asia. We landed on our ass down in the pits.
“Marcos Sr. tried to imitate the industrialization program of Korea,” Dr. Felipe wrote. “It failed due to policy mistakes. The implementation was very poor and the government failed to push exports. The program was financed with dollars….and the 1980s crisis hit us.
“Korea’s autocrat simply made the same decision that every single nation that has attained high income made: industrialize… Who would have thought 10 years ago that Vietnam (a planned, inefficient economy) would overtake us?
“The reason? They focused on manufacturing… Vietnam is also corrupt. That’s what we need to understand: failure is due to policy mistakes…
“The Philippines did not have the carrot and stick incentives that Korea had. Markets were protected but we had no push to export (wrong incentives, etc).”
Along the lines of thinking small, we seem to also think we can survive in isolation from the rest of the world, institutionalized in our inwardly looking Filipino First Constitution.
While we also had an industrialization policy, it was of the import substitution type. Korea, in contrast, thought of the world market…exports.
Our so-called industrialists were content to be protected to “manufacture” overpriced but sloppy products for the domestic consumers. Their game is capturing the regulator, penetrating and weakening the state, to extract maximum profits.
Today, we do not have a decent manufacturing sector. When world trade was liberalized with the WTO, our import substituting industrial sector was wiped out. And because we have small minds, our “industrialists” turned to “sure things” like property, pawnshop style banking, malls and politics.
Same problem in agriculture. A good example is the piggery sector. Thailand, with a population smaller than ours, produced over 21 million heads in 2024 compared to the Philippines’ estimated 10 million heads. A substantial portion of Thailand’s production came from large farms. Our industry, in contrast, is dominated by small-scale farms.
Sugar is another example that should make us cry. We had a head start of over 150 years, yet Thailand’s sugar sector is now significantly larger than ours, with an estimated 2024/25 production of 10.2 million metric tons compared to our pathetic production of 1.85 million metric tons.
In both the piggery and sugar sectors, the Thais took advantage of economies of scale.
We are happy with backyard piggeries. PIDS, the government economic think-tank, said our backyard hog farms have operating costs of P148.26 per kilo post-slaughter. Commercial farm costs are about P112.40 per kilo. Compare that to Thailand’s P97.53.
Our sugar industrialists chose to live the good life and squandered their salted sugar quota earnings. They failed to invest in modernization the way the Thais did.
Or maybe our agrarian reform program made it difficult for our sugar sector to give the Thais a good run for their money. But given the political clout of our sugar barons, they could have influenced government policy to induce modernization if they wanted to.
Nick Joaquin asks: “Is that the explanation for our continuing failure to rise — that we buy small and sell small, that we aim small and try small, that we think small and do small?”
Our political structure is affected by this small thinking.
Nick Joaquin observed: “We don’t grow like a seed, we split like an amoeba. The moment a town grows big it becomes two towns. The moment a province becomes populous it disintegrates into two or three smaller provinces…
“This attitude explains why we’re finding it so hard to become a nation…Foreigners had to come and unite our land for us; the labor is far beyond our powers…we start small and end small without ever having scaled any peaks…we are not capable of sustained effort and lose momentum fast…
“One writer, as he surveyed the landscape of shortages — no rice, no water, no garbage collectors, no peace, no order — gloomily mumbled that disintegration seems to be creeping upon us and groped for Yeats’s terrifying lines: Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed…
“As the population swells, our problems will expand and multiply. If they daunt us now, will they crush us then? The prospect is terrifying…
“Have our capacities been so diminished by the small effort we are becoming incapable even of the small thing?
“One American remarked that, after seeing Manila’s chaos of traffic (in the late 1980s), he began to appreciate how his city of Los Angeles handled its far, far greater volume of traffic. Is building a road that won’t break down when it rains no longer within our powers? Is even the building of sidewalks too herculean a task for us?”
Too bad, Mr. Joaquin did not live long enough to witness how we have embraced bigness at last: stealing from the government, at least a trillion pesos worth. That’s progress.
Boo Chanco’s email address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on X @boochanco