1
MANILA BULLETIN
Business & Society
December 19, 2011
Jose Rizal as Farm Entrepreneur
As my small contribution to celebrating the 150th birth anniversary of our National Hero
Jose Rizal, let me speculate on what could have happened if he had not been executed on
December 30, 1896 and had lived long enough to influence the development policies adopted by
the American regime in the first three decades of the twentieth century. Revealing my bias for
rural and agricultural development, I would venture to say that he would have been very active in
bringing development to the small farmers and to the rural dwellers. We would have avoided the
lack of inclusive growth (to use today's parlance) and the technological dualism in which
advanced technology was employed in the large plantations for export-oriented crops while the
rest of the agricultural sector (especially rice, corn and coconut) stagnated at the carabao-andplow stage.
On what do I base this speculation? First, on my personal knowledge of the history of the
Rizal family. From childhood, I had always heard of how the Rizal family was very much
involved in farming and trading of agricultural commodities. The eldest brother of my mother,
Bernabe, married a daughter of Soledad, the youngest sister of Rizal. My maternal grandfather,
General Miguel Malvar, was a close business associate of the Rizal family in a number of
agricultural undertakings. As I had written several times in this newspaper, Miguel Malvar was
a consummate farmer before the revolution and after the revolution. After he surrendered to the
Americans in 1901, he spent the rest of his life developing orchards in the Sto. Tomas, Batangas
and Calamba areas. One of the orange varieties for which Batangas was famous until a blight
2
destroyed the industry was named after my grandfather. I had always heard of the great interest
of Jose Rizal in agricultural endeavors.
That is why I am not surprised that the newest and thoroughly researched book on Jose
Rizal just published in 2010 by Luis Lisa and Javier de Pedro, entitled Romance and Revolution,
showed documentary evidence of the passion that Rizal had for agriculture. The book is a "look
into the lives and times of Jose Rizal and Josephine Bracken", exploding all sorts of myths about
the British girl that Rizal married. For those interested they will find all the strongest evidences
from original documents that the authors found in Barcelona and Hong Kong that, contrary to
calumnies that have circulated like urban legends for decades, Josephine Bracken was not a
mistress of her adopted father nor a bar girl nor a spy of the friars. The book also mustered
sufficiently strong evidences that Rizal married Josephine before he was executed and that she
was recognized as "Rizal's widow" by both members of the Rizal family and the revolutionaries
after the death of Rizal. But I am digressing from my original intention to write this essay.
On page 124 of the book Romance and Revolution, we can read a testimony to Rizal's
penchant for agriculture which reached a peak during his four years of exile in Dapitan. Let me
quote: "The most compelling proof that Rizal wished to stay in Dapitan with Josephine was his
immediate purchase of a piece of land in a barrio in Dapitan. He rhapsodized on his new
acquisition trying to lure his mother and father to come south. In one of his Letters to the
Family, dated January 15, 1896, Rizal wrote: "I bought here a piece of land close to a river that
reminds me much of one of Kalamba but broader and with greater and more transparent flow of
water. How much it reminds me of Kalamba! The land has 6,000 plants of abaca and if father
and other would like to come here, I will build a big house for us to live together until we die.
I'll convince father to come, and by my side he will always be cheerful. My beautiful property is
3
towards the interior, separated from the sea for around half an hour walk. The place is truly
scenic and the land very fertile. Aside from the abacas, there is enough space to plant 2 cavans
of maize. Gradually we could buy the surrounding lands. There is plenty of dalag (fresh water
fish), pako (edible ferns) and small rounded stones: the river bed is all pebbles."
Unfortunately, this dream of Jose Rizal never came true because shortly after he wrote this
letter, the Spanish authorities tried to send him back to Spain and then summarily recalled him to
Manila in order to face the charge of rebellion which culminated in his execution at what is now
the Luneta. If things had turned out otherwise and his "agribusiness plan" had been realized,
Rizal could have been, like the King of Thailand, a rallying point for agricultural development.
His creating another "Kalamba" in very primitive Dapitan would have been a model of the
development of Mindanao. Through Rizal's example, inclusive growth would have been more
possible in the decades that followed. Farming would have been the choice of more people from
the middle class instead of being considered a lowly occupation. The State would have devoted
more resources to building farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities and
other infrastructures direly needed by the small farmers to be more productive.
Rizal would have become a hero in another way: redeeming the rural folks from abject
poverty. He would have been true to the name adopted by his family whose real surname was
Mercado but who added the name Rizal at the suggestion of a provincial governor who was a
family friend. As Leon Maria Guerrero wrote in his biography of Jose Rizal entitled "The First
Filipino," "Rizal" in Spanish means a field where wheat, cut while still green, sprouts again. If
our leaders had committed themselves to creating new "Kalambas" in remote areas like Dapitan
very early on in our development efforts, even the political threats of the muslim rebellion and
the NPA would have not been an insurmountable obstacle to eradicating rural poverty. The
4
plants that would have been cut while still green would have sprouted again and again. In fact,
true agricultural development would have actually minimized these political threats since it is
poverty that mainly explains social unrest.
bernardo.villelgas@uap.asia.
For comments, my email address is