If Domingo Lamco saw Xiamen today…

Towards the end of the 17th century, Domingo Lamco left his hometown in the region of Amoy, China, now Xiamen, for a better life in a foreign land. He wasn’t the only one. For centuries, traders and impoverished peasants from the Southern Chinese province of Fujian crossed the South China Sea to a group of islands under Spanish rule known as Las Islas Filipinas.

Those who were traders came to Manila to take advantage of the trans-Pacific Galleon Trade to Acapulco, Mexico. Still many opted to stay in the Philippines to start new lives. The trip took them many days. It now only takes two hours in a direct flight of Philippine Airlines from Manila.

Who is Domingo Lamco? Jose Rizal, our national hero, the Pride of the Malay race, is the direct descendant of Chinese trader Cua Yi Lam, who immigrated from Siongque to the Philippines in the later part of the 17th century. Church records show that Cua Yi Lam was baptized Domingo Lamco at the age of 35 in Manila in 1697 and that his birthplace was Siongque village in China. The ancestors of most Chinoys today also come from this part of China.

Last Saturday, I visited the Rizal monument in Siongque Village, Jinjiang City, Fujian Province, southern China with the trade and investment delegation led by Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap. The monument, made of the world-famous Jinjiang granite stones, stands at 18.61 meters high, which is taller than the 12-meter high Rizal Monument in Manila. It is on a five-hectare park named in Rizal’s honor, making it the biggest Rizal Shrine outside the Philippines. I was told the park will also be the site of a Rizal museum and library.

Going back to Domingo Lamco, I couldn’t help wonder, as we drove through Fujian province, how he would feel if he saw Xiamen today. He would probably be amazed at how his impoverished hometown has become a modern metropolis with public infrastructure our visiting group of Filipinos could only look at with envy.

Oh well… that’s because the sleeping dragon that is China has truly awakened. But any Filipino visiting Xiamen today can’t help but wonder how we have been left behind so quickly, and it isn’t even one of China’s top three cities. I am told that most Filipinos have Chinese blood in their veins… definitely over 50 percent of us. How come we lost the drive and the entrepreneurship the Chinese people are known for? Unlike the Chinese in Malaysia, for instance, we have so assimilated the local Chinese to the point that they lost this quality of "Chinese-ness" we need to be a tiger economy ourselves. I am told that many of the Chinoys who go to China aren’t aggressive risk takers anymore. Our Chinoys are too "segurista" about their investments there compared to the natives.

Well… lucky for us friendship and family ties are important to the Chinese. This is probably why the Chinese government has given us top priority in their foreign aid program. And as Art Yap found out last week, the Chinese government is determined to help not only through the usual "foreign aid" but through increased bilateral trade.

It is interesting to note that China has started to talk and to act like a true superpower. Last Friday at the APEC meeting in Hanoi, President Hu Jintao called for increasing aid to developing countries to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor.

"We should increase official development assistance with no strings attached to developing countries , intensify economic and technical cooperation in various forms and help them in human resources development, thus helping to foster an enabling external environment for their development," Hu said.

Imbalance in development remains a major problem in our globalizing world, Hu observed. "Some developing countries have not gained their fair share of benefits from economic globalization," Hu declared. To the Chinese leader, China’s development goes hand in hand with the development of the Asia-Pacific and the world.

And so it seems we can look up to China to step up to the role of a regional super power ready to help us put up vital infrastructure and of course, increase bilateral trade. China’s voracious appetite for commodities we can mine or plant here should give us a steady market. And from what Art Yap told me, it seems China’s ready to help us create jobs in the agri-business sector that should improve the economic conditions of our rural population.

Chinese goodies

The big advantage of Art Yap when he negotiates in China is that he speaks the language well enough to make the Chinese feel at ease. Last Saturday, I witnessed Art sign a memo of understanding with Beidahuang, an agricultural conglomerate that is the corporate arm of the Heilongjiang Provincial Government in Northern China. This province is part of Northeast China (or Manchuria) and borders Russia to the north.

This group wants to lease large tracts of farmland from us to plant crops with a ready market in China. Recently, Beidahuang, has begun to invest overseas, initiating farming activities in Russia. It is a fairly large conglomerate with total assets of 50 billion yuan and its sales in 2005 was in excess of 27 billion yuan. It ranks first among all of China’s large scale agricultural enterprises. (Very roughly, 1 yuan = P7.)

For the Philippines, Beidahuang is interested to engage in: a) rice and corn production (a total of 200,000 hectares) in the North Luzon Agribusiness.

Quadrangle area; b) agri-tourism and organic food growing; c) setting up a farm machinery production facility concentrated in modern, not basic, technologies found in modern food processing lines; and d) setting up a bio-ethanol facility.

Art also successfully negotiated a facility for the entry of Philippine tropical fruits directly into China. The Guangzhou Jiangnan Fruit and Vegetable Wholesale Market Development Co. Ltd., has agreed to allocate 1,000 square meter space our tropical fruit exporters can use to directly sell into the Chinese market. The exporters will be charged on commission basis. The Jiangnan market handles 80 percent of all the fresh fruits being traded in China. According to the Market officials, their 2005 turnover for fruits is in excess of one billion US dollars.

In this regard, the Vice Mayor of Guangzhou Government, Su Ze Lun, told Yap that it is now their policy to move their agricultural production to the ASEAN for export of the produce back into China. This fits well with the program of Ate Glue for agribusiness land development as means of reducing unemployment in the countryside.

China will need all the food it can get for its over a billion population and they are now ready to help us tap this market. It is a win-win situation because as they help us improve our agricultural productivity and provide a ready market for our produce, we improve the income of our rural families and our food security situation as well.

The other big project Secretary Yap explored last week in China has to do with a budding local industry that uses coconut fiber. Yap visited the largest geo-textile matting project in China which used coco-coir fibers from the Philippines, the Datian Shan Landfill project (about six hectares of geo-textile matting for Phase 1) to protect against soil erosion.

Yap was able to negotiate our potentially exporting to China at least 100,000 metric tons of coco-coir fibers of a maximum of 17 percent moisture content and 97 percent purity for 2007. With this forward contract, the Philippine Coconut Authority can now work with the local coconut industry to consolidate collecting the husks and the grant of decorticating machines for the supply contract.

Due to space limitations, I will report on the other projects in a future column. Suffice it to say for now that it makes sense to work closely with China in developing our agribusiness potentials. We have the advantage of just being at China’s backdoor, a lot easier in selling our produce to China than for countries in Africa or Latin America who are also after the same market. It seems China can buy almost anything we can produce. And they will even help us with capital and technology to produce them. It can’t get any better than that.

Old sailor

Lal Chatlani sent this one, rated R.

An old retired sailor puts on his old uniform and heads to the docks once more for old times sake. He engages a prostitute and takes her up to a room. He’s soon going at it as well as he can for a guy his age, but needing some reassurance, he asks, "How am I doing "?

The prostitute replies, "Well old sailor, you’re doing about three knots".

"Three knots?" he asks, "What’s that suppose to mean?"

She says, "You’re knot hard, you’re knot in, and you’re knot getting your money back!"

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]