The Dead Season: A Time of Waiting, Hunger and Growing Insurgency

This is the tiempo muerto --the dead season--in the island province of Negros Occidental, the time between planting and harvest. There is no work and, in the nearby farmlands and mountains, hunger and a Communist-led insurgency are growing.

Otherwise, it is a time of waiting. Sugar workers are waiting to see whether they will have jobs in October when the harvest season begins. The planters are still waiting for government checks for last year’s crop.

Just over a decade ago, the planters were riding a wave of profits. They built new homes, bought new cars and gave Bacolod, the provincial capital, a jumping night life. Their money filled political war chests in Manila. Few saw then that time was running out for Negros and its one-crop economy and semi-feudal haciendas.

“All our eggs were in one basket,” Daniel L. Lacson Jr., a Bacolod businessman, said the other day. “Times were so good that nobody listened.”

The collapse began in 1975. A year earlier, a preferential trade agreement with the United States expired, eliminating a guaranteed market for Philippine sugar that had completed the cycle of financing here. The planter borrowed against next year’s crop to meet current expenses and made his profit with the guaranteed export sale. The bank loan was paid off and the cycle began again.

But many Negros planters let their debts ride. They continued to pursue the good life even as the price of sugar was falling. From a high of 65 cents a pound in 1974, the world price has fallen to less than 4 cents.

Most sugar is sold at higher rates under contract deals or on protected domestic markets, but the decline in the world price spelled disaster for the Philippines and other sugar-producing nations.

Negros remains the king of Philippine sugar, accounting for about 55% of the country’s total production, but the current crop is off by nearly 40%. The province is broke.

“We are no longer a pillar of the Philippine economy,” Salvador Laguda, a Bacolod banker, said. “We’re just a post.”

Hardest hit have been the sugar workers. Most are bewildered and some are getting angry. About 300,000 of them have had no work since May.

Since the Spanish colonial days of the last century, landless peasants have worked the farms of Negros. Generations of families have lived on the same hacienda. “They are born on the farm, marry there and die there,” Laguda said.

The minimum legal wage for a farm worker is 32 pesos a day (about $1.72), but no one is getting it now. The average pay is about 50% to 60% of the minimum, according to Lacson, and some workers get as little as 10 pesos a day--when there is work.

Rice costs about 3.4 pesos a pound, about half of a small family’s daily need. As a result, there is hunger and malnutrition. Many sugar workers who have lost their jobs have moved into squatter towns ringing Bacolod, a city of 250,000. The government, the church and voluntary groups have started feeding programs for the worst-off.

Under the shade of a tree on the grounds of the provincial hospital here, women of the Negros Occidental Auxiliary Foundation, several of them members of prominent planter families, were serving a porridge of rice, chicken and mung beans to children from the squatter belt.

“There are so many that we can only try to help those with second- or third-degree malnutrition,” Corazon Zayko, a leader of the auxiliary, told a visitor.

Inside the hospital, children suffering from severe malnutrition and illness were being fed intravenously. Six percent of Bacolod’s preschool children have third-degree malnutrition, meaning that their body weight is 65% of normal, and Bishop Antonio Y. Fortich of Bacolod estimated that malnutrition affects 20,000 people in the province.

“Hunger is the issue here,” he has said. “Unless we give them food to eat they will be prey for the NPAs.”

The NPAs are the guerrillas of the New People’s Army, the military wing of the Communist Party of the Philippines. Three years ago their number on Negros was estimated at no more than 50. Estimates now range as high as 1,000.

The insurgency is said to be growing faster here than anywhere else in the Philippines. Eduardo Ledesma, executive director of the Sugar Industry Foundation, and other planter spokesmen say the collapse of the sugar industry has made the rebels’ job easier.

“It’s an immediate threat in Negros,” Ledesma said. “It’s like a taxi meter. The flag is down and it’s ticking.”

Unless the government and the private sector can “get their act together,” he said, the Communists could win within four years. Others in Bacolod say there is less time left than that.

Reform-minded planters like Ledesma say the heart of the problem is the planters’ traditional paternalistic relationship with their workers and the province’s dependence on a single crop. According to Leonardo J. Gallardo Jr., executive director of the Negros Economic Development Foundation, the attitude of the worker traditionally has been, “I don’t own a single square inch of this land; I am here at the benevolence of the owner.”

Gallardo, Lacson, Ledesma and others are trying to change the attitudes of farm workers and planters through a variety of businessmen’s groups.

Many planters blame their plight on the government, particularly the Philippine Sugar Commission and the National Sugar Trading Corp. Both were appointed by President Ferdinand E. Marcos in 1977, and together they gave the government a monopoly over the industry.

Mismanagement by the agencies--and corruption within them, critics say--is to blame for accelerating the fall of sugar. But whatever the reasons, planters are still waiting for sugar crop payments that were due in March. One of them said, “Manila has no money, and neither does Negros.”

Meanwhile, the militant National Federation of Sugar Workers is calling for workers’ wages 10% to 15% above the present minimum wage, and free land for them.

In early August, nine members of the sugar workers union were arrested in the foothills after a gunfight with the military. They are charged with illegal possession of firearms and subversive materials.

According to the union, the arms were left by a group that was giving them seminars. The subject: “Freedom . . . and the history of Spanish and American colonialism.” The teacher: “a man named Bunny who was with three others.” A Commander Bunny is one of the New People’s Army leaders in the mountains that divide Negros Occidental from its sister province to the east, Negros Oriental. And the “dead season” continues here with little hope for quick or easy solutions to the problems.