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Principal agricultural products

The principal agricultural products exported are sugar, hemp, and tobacco, and to a less extent coffee, the cultivation of which, however, has of late greatly decreased. Indigo, sapan-wood, and copra must not be left unmentioned, for they may certainly be expected to take a higher place in the Philippine trade in the future than is the case at present. Rice and maize are grown only for home consumption, and even for this purpose the supply is not large enough. Rice is imported from Saigon and Bangkok and cocoa from Java, although the extremely fertile soil of the Philippines could produce all that is required at home and enough to admit of a large export trade as well. Formerlyfrom 1850 to 1860, and perhaps laterrice was exported from the islands, but the quantity gradually decreased until exportation ceased altogether, and finally the grain began to be imported. The blame lies with the miserable administration of the country. The planter can no longer compete with Rangoon, Saigon, and Bangkok, where the authorities know how to meet the farmers when necessary, and where ships are not exposed to endless chicanery, such as is practiced by the Manila customhouse officials. For this reason most foreign vessels are careful to steer clear of the latter port. Sugar is chiefly exported from the Visayas islands, and the trade is almost exclusively via Iloilo, the largest place after Manila, situate on the island of Panay. Cebu, the third largest port of the archipelago, does now but a small and steadily declining trade in hemp. The best tobacco grows in the north of Luzon, in the province Isabella, and the south of Cagayan, the most northern province of that island, in the valley of the Rio Grande de Cagayan. The northern provinces of Luzon, from the Gulf of Lingayen, in the west, to the Pacific, are separated from Manila by a range of high mountains, the Caraballo, over which there is, with the exception of a path and the telegraph, no road whatever, much less a railway. The tobacco, therefore, is sent on covered boats, called ” barangaijanes,” down the Rio Grande to Aparri, and there shipped by steamer to Manila. A flat-bottomed steamboat also runs from Hagan, when the water allows it; otherwise it goes only as far as Tuguegarao. In this way the transport from the. most southern tobacco center, Echague (which as the crow flies is only about 150 miles), often takes as much as three weeks. Tobacco has also been planted on the west coast of the northern part of Luzon and on the Visayas islands. This, however, is of inferior quality, and is mostly exported to Spain. In Manila it is not used, except, perhaps, by the Chinese factories for inferior cigarettes. Regarding the tobacco monopoly, abolished in 1883, I shall have some remarks to make later.