Hollow boom

We love a good trophy in Western Visayas. Tell our officials that the region clocked a 6.4% gross domestic product growth rate in 2025 — the fastest among all 18 regions in the country, blowing past the 4.4% national average to hit PHP 683.44 billion — and you can practically hear the champagne corks popping in the capitol halls.

But try explaining that trophy to a sugarcane cutter in Capiz or a tricycle driver in Iloilo staring down a 9.7% October inflation rate. You cannot eat a percentage point.

Beneath the celebratory numbers from the November 6 briefing of the newly reorganized Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DepDev, created under Republic Act 12145), the math tells a quieter, more exhausting story. Nearly one in five workers here — 17.2% — is underemployed. They are working full days for partial survival, scrambling for extra hours because our PHP 683.44 billion economy is missing its spine. Services carried 4.2 percentage points of our 6.4% growth, and raw agriculture hauled 1.4 percentage points, while industry barely registered at 0.8 percentage points. Our industrial location quotient sits at a dismal 0.66 — barely two-thirds of the national average.

DepDev Undersecretary Carlos Abad Santos called processing and manufacturing our “missing middle,” and he put the dilemma plainly:

“In simple terms, we produce a lot of food. We have a growing services economy, but we are not doing enough processing and manufacturing within the region.”

We harvest the grain, catch the seafood, and pick the fruit, then ship them out raw so someone else can bottle, package, and sell them back to us at thrice the price.

Breaking that colonial habit takes more than investment briefings. You cannot build factories on expensive power and delayed bridges. That 9.7% October inflation spike is driven by punishing electricity and transport costs that strangle local processors before they can even buy a packaging machine.

Meanwhile, our flagship logistics lifelines keep slipping. The Department of Public Works and Highways pushed construction of the Panay-Guimaras section of the Panay-Guimaras-Negros Interisland Link Bridge from July 2026 to the fourth quarter of 2027, and the Panay Railway has been a ghost since the 1980s. Until agencies fast-track the Leganes-to-Malay expressway and harness our wind, solar, and biomass potential to lower factory power bills, agro-industrialization will stay trapped on PowerPoint slides.

Iloilo City cannot carry five provinces on its back, either. Letting Aklan, Antique, Capiz, Guimaras, and Iloilo compete for the exact same investments is a losing game. DepDev and regional development councils need the spine to enforce provincial specialization through targeted incentives and zoning — pairing Iloilo City’s IT-BPM, health information management, and creative services with cold chains, shared processing facilities, and state-university food packaging hubs in the provinces, supplying our heritage and gastronomy tourism from within.

Until the people growing our food actually keep the value of what they pull from the soil and the sea, 6.4% is just applause for someone else’s profit.