The hollow middle

Walk past the cranes and glass towers of Iloilo City, and it is easy to believe Western Visayas has finally arrived. Data from the Department of Economy, Planning, and Development tells a harsher story. Services swallow 66.5% of the PHP 641.76 billion regional economy, and agriculture and fishing post a high location quotient of 1.89, yet industry sits at an anemic 0.66. Manufacturing and processing added a measly 0.8 percentage points to the 6.4% regional growth in 2025. After Republic Act 12000 placed Negros Occidental and its sugar mills into a separate region in June 2024, Panay and Guimaras stood exposed as an economy that skipped the factory floor entirely, leaping straight from muddy paddies to malls and call centers.

That leap is an economic trap as farmers in central Iloilo and fisherfolk along the Capiz coast take the brunt of severe weather, while middlemen and outside conglomerates pocket the retail profits because rural towns lack cold storage and packing plants. Raw grain and fresh catch leave local ports cheap, only to return to provincial grocery shelves as pricey canned and packaged goods shipped in from Metro Manila or Cebu. DepDev Undersecretary Carlos Bernardo Abad Santos calls this gap the “missing middle.” It is the exact leak that drains farmgate incomes and drives rural workers into city boarding houses or airport departure halls.

The Regional Development Council-6 offers a blueprint to fix this in its 2025 to 2055 Regional Physical Framework Plan. Instead of letting Iloilo City choke on its own traffic and sprawl, this polycentric plan spreads specific economic roles across the islands: seafood processing in Roxas City, logistics in northeastern Iloilo, grain milling in central Iloilo, high-value crops in the Antique uplands, creative industries in Kalibo, agri-tourism in Guimaras, and trade convergence in Passi City. Master plans, however, gather dust in capitol drawers when mayors chase the same generic shopping strips and national agencies hand out incentives piecemeal. The Philippine Economic Zone Authority and the Department of Finance must enforce spatial discipline by tying tax perks, road budgets, and zoning approvals directly to these designated corridors, or the framework will remain another glossy government brochure.

But factories do not run on PowerPoint slides. Investors skip rural ecozones when electricity rates punish heavy machinery, power grids trip without warning, and silted rivers flood supply routes across Capiz and central Iloilo. Cold storage requires cheap, steady power. Before pitching light manufacturing to outside locators, regional leaders must treat renewable energy integration, port upgrades, the Panay River Basin project, and the Jalaur River Multipurpose Project Stage II as non-negotiable prerequisites.

Pushing industry into the countryside also brings a threat that municipal halls ignore. As warehouses and processing plants spread toward secondary towns ahead of the Panay-Guimaras-Negros bridges, local governments with outdated Comprehensive Land Use Plans risk paving over the very food basket they want to industrialize. Letting logistics hubs swallow prime irrigated rice lands, particularly fields newly fed by Jalaur waters, defeats the entire purpose of rural development. Western Visayas needs an industrial middle so local wealth stays home, but a warehouse built on ruined farmland only trades one vulnerability for another.