Traders see progress with new Lanao Sur town market

COTABATO CITY, Philippines — Muslim merchants in Amai Manabilang, Lanao del Sur are certain of improvements in their trade ties with Christian counterparts in Bukidnon province in Region 10 once the P25 million worth market building project in their municipality gets done.

Many of the farmers in the hinterland Amai Manabilang town in the first district of Lanao del Sur in the Bangsamoro region are former guerillas of the Moro National Liberation Front and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, now producing potatoes, lettuce and other high-value short-term crops.

Lanao del Sur Gov. Mamintal Adiong, Jr. said Saturday they are grateful to the Ministry of the Interior and Local Government-Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao for providing Amai Manabilang with a P25 million market building project.

“It is so necessary in invigorating the economy of the municipality, somehow stunted by security issues in decades past,” he said.

Amai Manabilang is not too distant from Butig, also in the first district of the province and hometown of the slain siblings Omarkhayam and Abdullah Maute, founders of the now virtually non-existent Maute terror group that government forces purged after its five-month siege of more than a dozen barangays in Marawi City in 2017.

Hakim Mansur, a Maranao vegetable dealer, said Saturday he and his partners have long wished for a good market building in the town proper of Amai Manabilang to whose occupants they can sell farm products from the cold hinterlands of the municipality.

“This market-building project is very important to us,” he said.

The project, bankrolled by the BARMM government, is being implemented jointly by the local government unit of Amai Manabilang and the office of Regional Local Government Minister Naguib Sinarimbo.

The chairman of the MNLF, Muslimin Sema, who is current labor and employment minister of BARMM, said they have members in Amai Manabilang, also farmers, who are to benefit from the project too.

Arnel Cantomayor, a farmer in Kalilangan town in Bukidnon, who is propagating green and red bell peppers, onions and ginger as means of livelihood, said he will sell his harvests to Maranao vendors who are to operate stalls in the new Amai Manabilang public market building being built together by the MILG-BARMM and local officials.

“Maranao businessmen buy spices and herbs in bulk because Maranaos are known for their heavy use of such in their traditional recipes,” Cantomayor said.