Cycle Of Political Vengeance! POOR PEOPLE IN RICH LAND; RURAL DEVELOPMENT ENIGMA By Emmanuel F. Piñol, PhD

Exactly six years ago, shortly after then President-elect Rodrigo R. Duterte announced that I would be the Agriculture Secretary under his administration, I took a long trip from Mindanao to Luzon, passing through the islands of Leyte and Samar.
One of the sights which struck me was the paradox of Samar Island, a place so rich with natural resources and fertile land but where many people wallow in abject poverty.
It is not that a fourth of me is “Waray” which gives me this feeling of kinship with the people of Samar and Leyte, rather it is my inquisitiveness, my desire to understand complex situations which attracted me to this island of great ironies.
Samar Island and the three provinces in it are listed in the 10 poorest areas of the Philippines, with poverty incidence reaching as high as 50%.
Yet, with 1.3-million hectares of rich and fertile lands with huge rivers meandering in its plains, Samar holds the potential of becoming a major food production area.
The “Warays” of Samar are known as brave warriors, a folklore proven in the historic “Balangiga Attack” where natives of the island armed only with bolo and spears decimated a company of American soldiers in Balangiga town, earning a retaliation where an American General ordered his men to turn the island into a “howling wilderness.”
Yet, the people of the island are so afraid to venture beyond what they have been used to and comfortable with as exemplified by their continued use of primitive farming methods instead of adopting new technologies.
The “Warays” of Samar are known to be rebellious earning the tag of being the center of the Communist Insurgency Movement in the whole Philippines with the rebels’ unofficial headquarters in Las Navas town.
Yet, the “Warays” have remained meek and submissive to the decades of political exploitation where they only get to fill the supermarkets and malls to go on a shopping spree after every election.
Things changed a bit when I was Secretary of Agriculture, especially when the three provinces were included in the SAAD Program or Special Area for Agricultural Development.
The poverty incidence, however, remained high and agricultural production very low, so I proposed a wholistic development of the island by submitting a program called Samar Island Rural Development Program to the DBCC.
The program was not funded though and, following my resignation as Secretary of Agriculture, it was soon forgotten.
But I have not forgotten my promise to the people of Samar to help change things, even if I did not make it to the Senate.
I am now organizing a private organization, call it NGO if you like, which would lead the development of Samar Island by working on its rich natural resources in lifting people out of poverty.
Any attempt to develop Samar Island must come from the outside because both the people and the political leaders are already caught up in a vicious cycle of political vengeance from which there is no getting out.
People sell their votes to the highest bidder during the elections while political leaders save up on every possible money-making project to prepare for the vote buying in the next elections.
This will go on and on if there is no intervention coming from the outside which would cut this vicious cycle of political vengeance.
The group that I am organizing now will still involve Samareños but I will make sure that they are not involved in active politics.
This is a private endeavour which I hope would finally cut the vicious cycle of political vengeance and introduce development to the island which I consider as one of the last frontiers for Agriculture and Fisheries production but whose full development had been stunted by corruption.
I will use my wide network of supporters, both here and abroad, to turn Samar Island into one of the major food production areas of the country and lift people out of poverty.
When I have achieved this, I would have kept my promise to the people of Samar Island that I will not abandon them.
#IMadeAPromiseIWillFulfill!