Last Wednesday as night gave way to day I stood on the balcony of my hotel in Bagasbas, Camarines Norte, watching the grey Pacific breakers under a heavy grey sky as the rain came driving in. It always feels disheartening when you are in a strange place, far from home, and the weather gives you a pounding. The people from the project had already texted to say it was going to be impossible to reach the community of indigenous people. My one day in the field after an eight hour drive the night before from Manila looked as if it was going to be spoilt.
So I texted back saying we'd go there anyway and get wet, like everybody else. And on the way the rain stopped and the hike up the hill was pretty short really with a pleasant little brook to wade across. The local representatives of the National Commission for Indigenous People were there ahead of us already cooking a meal for the community in a huge pot over a fire. Everything was fine. It usually works out like that.
I was down in Camarines Norte for the first time to visit a food security project which mainly focuses on supporting vulnerable lowland and upland farmers growing rice and pineapples, but also had a small component for the local indigenous community. In the afternoon I would be taking part in hand over cermonies for community irrigation schemes and the like, but I had asked to have the morning for the indigenous people.
The Kabihug are a small group, reckoned by Unicef in 2005 to have a total population of just 2,445 and described in the report of the Participatory Community Apppraisal conducted by Unicef in 2007 as 'living in a state of extreme deprivation with no access to proper housing, very little essential social services, and a discriminatory livelihood scheme based on an archaic land tenure system that violates basic rights.'
They are in fact a Negrito people, like the better known Aita and Dumagat, the forest dwelling inhabitants of the Philippines who were displaced by the Austronesian migrations. As always the discrimination mentioned in the Unicef report is related to race and appearance. The Negrito peoples are dark skinned and have curly hair. To this should be added the impoverishment that came over the years with displacement from their original homes, destruction of the forest environment and ultimately, in Camarines Norte, to their reduction to a bottom of the heap livelihood as itinerant day labourers, paid in kind at harvest time and otherwise simply fed in return for their work. In an ironic way, therefore, their nomadic forest people way of life retained its nomadic nature but based on a livelihood strategy of moving around in search of work.
That was my starting point, my baseline, if you like, with a great deal of questioning as to whether the project would really work for them, given that it was really a mainstream farmers project with a small indigenous peoples component, rather than something designed specifically with the Kabihug community in mind.
Of course the hike up the hill to visit a community is not a great way to do much more than say hello and gain a brief impression. It beats staying in the office, but then so do most activities, but the viewpoint of the visiting bureaucrat, happy as a newborn lamb to frisk around the countryside free from the shackles of his or her desk, should be seasoned with a great big dollop of humility and a surfeit of circumspection.
Of course, you still get an impression and you interact and it all goes into the big melting pot of ideas and discussion, internal and external, that you carry around with you, and sometimes you can help fix problems or point out weaknesses. And sometimes you can see some very good things that give you the grail-like warm glow...
And there is always an interesting feeling that comes when you are meeting a community on a grassy hilltop. Little by little they gather in the chosen place, while you sit and wait. And then you start to talk and I still have to remind myself after all these years that it is always a meeting of strangers and that they may be as curious about you as you are about them, so there is a lot of information to exchange before you can start ticking off the issues in your notebook. And I still also find it incredible how polite and receptive people are, willing to answer questions, discuss plans and ideas, explain the way they do things, tell you about themselves, their problems and their aspirations. as though you had a natural right to pry and probe.
I was happy with much of what I found on Wednesday morning. The children all had their school uniforms and were off down the hill to school, laughing and playing the way children should do, the people in the discussion group insisted they wanted to settle in this place now that it was their designated ancestral domain, twenty-three hectares of land for themselves, not the land of other farmers to work on for a pittance. The project is meant to help them get various crops started, including pineapples as a cash crop. I am not in a position to say whether it will work. There will be all kinds of problems and ups and downs, I am sure, but there is a chance that things will be better for the Kabihug than they have been in the past.
In all questions involving indigenous peoples the issue of land is fundamental. I have seen a wide variety of projects with different approaches regarding the various bits and pieces of technical input, but always the starting point must be the securing of land tenure by the community. There is nothing unusual in this, just as it is natural for a farmer to want to own his own land. The difference is that the concept of ownership is communal rather than individual and this has been a stumbling block in conceptual and legal terms all over the world. It has also been the basis for centuries of abuse and exploitation. In this sense, however over-complicated and fraught with all sorts of adminstrative and other problems it may be in practice, the Philippines' Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act of 1995, which incorporates the concept of ancestral domain and the granting of titles to communities, is a really important basic starting point.
The echoes in our own history are not difficult to find, if you consider the process of enclosing of common land in England, which took place over a prolonged period with many examples of ruthlessly suppressed resistance by the dispossessed peasantry, culminating in the 18th century in the Enclosures Act. A good Marxist would of course point immediately to the primitive accumulation that takes place in this process - resource extraction, plunder, enslavement and forcible eviction of the weak by the strong, human history as a reflection of a lot of what is nasty, selfish and greedy in human nature. In England of course peasant farmers were driven from their livelihoods, which depended on the availability of sufficient common land, to become either the exploited workforce of the new factories created by the industrial revolution or landless agricultural labourers of the kind that crop up on the fringes of Thomas Hardy's novels. It seems shameful somehow that we cannot do better than that in the 21st century.
Maybe we can. Granting Ancestral Domain titles is a start. Maybe also the REDD+ programme born out of our growing concern about climate change and the need to preserve forests wherever possible will also offer opportunities for indigenous communities to benefit from this concern for a global public good as the natural custodians of the forests where they live.
Back on the sea front at Bagasbas shortly before sundown, the sun was shining and the small group of surfers were out enjoying the waves. The province is hoping to grow its tourism based on the attractions of the place as a 'low-key', as the literature always puts it, surf resort. Other than that the main product of the province is pineapples - I took three boxes of them back for colleagues in the office. They are sweet and delicious.
But back to the beach thing and tourism. The funny thing about these places in the Philippines is that they are always talking about their future potential, when they always have a sort of semi-derelict look about them as if they once were a great holiday destination but have now been left behind to live in their past, just like so many of the old seaside resorts in England that became nowhere places after the package holiday in Spain became the norm. There are one or two shack like bars along the sea front, one hideous derelict building which gives the whole row a melancholy air, a single halfway posh hotel that is half constructed at this time and a rather tired municipal garden. Flotsam and jetsam litter the beach of course. It is all ok if you, like me, want to get away from the noisy, crowded resorts, but it does have that slightly faded feeling, not a virgin beach, just a small, run down, wanton sort of place.
Other aspects of the province share this feature. The main road south through Bicol now bipasses Camarines Norte altogether, which is ironic in a way, since the Province opposed the renovation of the railways back in the 1970s precisely because the line did not go through its capital Daet. The province used to have an important fishing industry, but this has been decimated by over fishing and destructive practices, such as the use of coral-crushing trawl nets by big boats from outside the province. Once upon a time there was a major iron mine, but that shut down long ago. And then there is gold, but what remains is mined informally by small scale miners (with several hundred children possibly involved in child labour in very bad conditions). It's all in the past. Being a particular kind of Brit I have a liking for nostalgia tinged with melancholy. Catch me at the wrong moment and I am always inclined to say that things were somehow sweeter and better in my childhood than they are today - we had proper working villages where I grew up not the soulless dormitories that they have become today.
It's all piffle of course, just the reflections of a mood I sometimes get into. Meanwhile, I hope the surfing does take off in Bagasbas, just as I hope all the beneficiaries of the project I went to visit, lowland farmers, upland farmers and indigenous people alike, do well out of it.
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