BARMM generates P3.2-B investments in three months

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Investors had poured in from January to March this year P3.2 billion worth of capital for various business ventures in the Bangsamoro region, surpassing the regional government’s supposed investments target of only P3 billion for the whole year.

Mohammad Pasigan, chairperson of the Bangsamoro Regional Board of Investments (BRBOI), and the region’s chief minister, Abdulrauf Macacua, separately told reporters on Sunday, April 13, that the P3.2 billion worth capital inputs are earmarked for agriculture and agribusiness projects, including large-scale propagation of bamboos and abaca.

The BRBOI, operating under Macacua’s supervision, had approved in recent weeks the investment proposals by capitalists from outside of the autonomous region.

“We in the BRBOI and our chief minister are happy about these very promising developments,” Pasigan said.

Pasigan and the entrepreneur-lawyer Ronald Hallid Torres, chairman of the Bangsamoro Business Council, separately said they are also gladly anticipating the setting up by an investor of a modern hospital in Marawi City, which, according to both of them, shall apparently employ health workers from the local Muslim, Christian and non-Moro indigenous communities.

Investors from different regions and from abroad had come to the capitol in Cotabato City of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao in recent weeks to meet Macacua, officials of the BRBOI and the region’s business communities and discussed with them potential businesses they can put up in BARMM’s Maguindanao del Sur, Maguindanao del Norte, Lanao del Sur, Basilan and Tawi-Tawi provinces.

BARMM’s core territory also encompasses the cities of Lamitan, Marawi and Cotabato, where there are big businesses being operated by Chinese merchants, many of them with partners in other regions in the country and abroad.

Torres said the socio-economic agenda of the government’s separate peace overtures with the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front have taken off, its effects now felt in many areas in BARMM that were ravaged by secessionist conflicts in past decades.