The mango pizza wake-up call

We celebrated when Western Visayas posted an economic output of PHP 683.44 billion in 2025, but nobody wanted to read the fine print.

Services bankrolled exactly 66.5% of that pie, while agriculture limped in at a dismal 14.9%.

It is a headset and hotel economy, and we are practically begging for the next global crisis to wipe us out again.

The Department of Economy, Planning, and Development 6 finally said the quiet part out loud — a services-led economy is not sustainable.

Tourism and BPOs are great cash cows, but they are made of glass.

When borders close or algorithms gut call centers, we need the heavy, dirty grit of manufacturing to act as an economic shock absorber.

DEPDev-6 director Arecio Casing Jr. pointed to Guimaras mangoes to explain what real wealth looks like.

A farmer sells a raw mango for PHP 70 a kilo, but a restaurant slices it onto a pizza and charges PHP 300.

We have normalized a system where our farmers harvest the palay and the sugar, only to watch outsiders process the goods and pocket the actual profit margins.

Poverty in our fields is not born of laziness — it is the direct result of being trapped at the very bottom of the value chain.

The push for agro-industry is essentially a mandate to build local processing plants so we stop exporting our potential.

But building a factory base requires us to address the massive, blinking elephant in the room.

You cannot industrialize an island where the power grid trips on a regular Tuesday.

Panay’s electricity remains notoriously expensive and wildly unreliable.

Factories and processing plants run on steady baseload power, not the good intentions of regional planners or the empty promises of utility distributors.

If local governments and the private sector cannot figure out how to keep the lights on and lower the rates, any talk of an industrial revolution in Western Visayas is purely science fiction.

Then there is the human element.

Even if we magically fix the grid and build the processing plants, who exactly is going to run them?

Our regional universities operate as highly efficient assembly lines for nurses, seafarers, and hospitality workers.

If we want an agro-industrial backbone, we urgently need a cultural pivot toward STEM degrees.

We are currently starved for food technologists, industrial engineers, and supply chain experts.

Parents and educators need to realize that the most lucrative, future-proof jobs of the next decade will not all require a passport or a headset.

We have spent decades mastering the art of serving others. It might be time we finally learned how to make something of our own.