One market day is not a livelihood plan

Around PHP 3 billion into redeveloping the Iloilo Terminal Market and Iloilo Central Market under a public-private partnership with the city government. The results are undeniably impressive — cleaner facilities, expanded vendor capacity from 911 to 1,160 stalls, better ventilation, proper sanitation. Nobody’s arguing against that. But less than five months after the grand opening last October, hundreds of ambulant vendors were out on the streets of Plaza Libertad, protesting their displacement. And now the Local Economic Enterprise Office is offering them what it calls a compromise: one market day per week, every Tuesday.

Stallholders inside the redeveloped market sell six days a week. Bolanteros — many of whom kept commerce alive in and around the Terminal Market during the entire construction period — get one. LEEO Head Maricel Mabaquiao frames this as a “win-win situation.” But when you do the math, it’s six-to-one. A vendor who used to sell daily now has to compress an entire week’s income into a single Tuesday. That’s not balance. That’s a managed exit dressed up as accommodation.

The city is invoking the “Huwebesan” tradition at the Jaro Big Market as a model — the longstanding Thursday market day that draws crowds for fresh produce, fish, and meat. It’s a fair-sounding comparison until you think about it for more than a few seconds. Huwebesan didn’t come from a government memo. It grew over decades as an organic commercial and cultural practice that both vendors and buyers shaped together. What’s being proposed for the Terminal Market is the opposite: a top-down scheduling restriction packaged in the language of tradition. You can’t manufacture that kind of market culture by decree. Citing Huwebesan as precedent feels more like political branding than economic planning.

Then there’s the question of who counts as “legitimate.” LEEO says it has more than 300 transient vendors in its database, mostly Iloilo City residents who were documented during the temporary relocation. The ones now being cleared? Mabaquiao says they’re “new entrants,” many from surrounding towns in Iloilo province, who never registered. But that master list was compiled during a construction period, under fluid conditions. Plenty of vendors who’ve been trading in and around the Terminal Market for years may never have been captured by LEEO’s documentation process. The list wasn’t designed as a permanent gatekeeping tool, and yet that’s exactly how it’s functioning now. A database entry has become the dividing line between having a livelihood and being classified as a nuisance.

This isn’t unique to Iloilo. Across the Philippines — where the informal economy accounts for roughly 36 percent of employment — public market modernization projects routinely upgrade the physical infrastructure while squeezing out the small-scale vendors who rely on daily, face-to-face selling to survive. The pattern is familiar: build something modern, formalize access, and let the people who can’t clear the bureaucratic bar fend for themselves.

The city government can still get this right, but not with Tuesday-only selling. If LEEO is serious about inclusion, it should expand market days to at least three per week while a more permanent integration plan is developed. It should open the vendor registry to those who were trading before and during construction, not just those who happened to land on a list compiled under extraordinary circumstances.

The bolanteros are not begging for handouts. They’re asking for what they had before the bulldozers arrived: space and time to sell. One day a week is not a plan but an ominous countdown.