The resource-rich Mindanao, our second largest island, has held great promise for decades as strategically positioned to become our country’s food basket and premier area for agricultural production with vast potential enough to ensure our food security.

Geographically blessed, even at this time when the buzzword is climate change, Mindanao as a whole is projected to be least affected by emerging extreme weather patterns driven by global warming. It is situated south of the Philippines where typhoons come infrequently, thus largely sparing it from devastating natural calamities.

Mindanao as the country’s food basket and even food supplier of the world is not really a new concept. In the past, Mindanao served as the country’s “rice bowl” next to Central Luzon’s “rice granary” and as early as the 1930s, Mindanao exported agricultural produce mainly pineapple to the US market.

Right after the last World War, while heavily war-damaged Manila and most parts of Luzon were struggling to get back on track, Mindanao surged with coconut production in response to the growing demand for coconut oil in Europe and the US needed for the manufacture of cooking oil, margarine and a host of other food products.

At present, although our most important agricultural exports such as banana, coconut, palm oil, pineapple and other high-yield crops come from Mindanao, it is now sadly a land stalked by hunger – a stark reality diametrically opposed to its potential and promise as a food basket.

In essence, one of the underlying reasons for the meltdown of the Mindanao promise is the breakdown of peace and order caused by widening civil strife and armed conflict, which consequently has resulted in disrupting the people’s livelihoods, destroying their farms and their capacity to produce food and to feed themselves.

Widely regarded early on as a frontier, Mindanao has morphed from a land of promise to a perilous place, evoking contrasting images of plenty and deprivation, of development and destitution, of war and peace, of life and senseless death.

As a result of the Maguindanao massacre which is a national shame, the whole of Mindanao is now unfortunately perceived as a land symbolizing a travesty of justice and freedom and all that we stand for as a supposedly democratic nation.

And as the gory details in connection with the massacre continue to unravel like the shocking testimony made by a self-confessed former child assassin who said “I killed hundreds for the Ampatuans,” our sense of outrage is all the more pushed to the limits.

Hiding under the name of “Abdul” and as a child assassin working for the Ampatuan clan, he said in an interview with ABS-CBN News that he killed no less than 100 people and his first cold-blooded hit, gunning down a councilor right inside his home, came at age 12.

There also was a time when he was sneaked out of jail to ambush right at the Comelec headquarters a group of Ampatuan’s political foes on November 2, 2002. In this outing, Abdul killed three men including a lawyer, Atty. Felix Lidasan, who was then following up an electoral protest.
“This is shocking. This is really unbelievable. I mean, the Ampatuan massacre is already unbelievable. What (Abdul) is revealing is like a movie,” Commission on Human Rights Chair Leila de Lima said.

Well, indeed, truth is stranger than fiction. Overall, if it is not managed well right away, Mindanao can rapidly descend into a hellhole, possibly dragging the whole country all the way down. Lust for power and money is at the bottom of all this trouble, an appetite whetted up by playing politics with the powers-that-be in Imperial Manila.

Undoubtedly, Mindanao dilemma is one issue of paramount importance to our country and future that must be clearly addressed by all presidentiables, preferably in a national debate.

Email: businessagenda_report@yahoo.com.ph.