1906 Opinion on the Establishment of an Agricultural Bank in Batangas
This page an excerpt from Exhibit B containing information on “Agricultural Credit in the Philippines,” which was among the appendices of the “Report of the Governor-General of the Philippines,” the third major part of the “Seventh Annual Report of the Philippine Commission 19061 published in 1907. This excerpt extracts only text pertaining to the Province of Batangas.
While the source PDF document had OCR (optical character recognition) properties, not all the text could be extracted accurately. Thus, large parts of this report had to be manually transcribed for the purposes of accuracy. The page given in this page is as it appears in the original document, done for the benefit of researchers who may need these for citation purposes.
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| A rural scene in American era Philippines. Image digitally extracted from the 1898 publication “Our New Possessions.” |
[TRANSCRIPTION]
[p. 515]
The province of Batangas is solely an agricultural province, and the prostration of agriculture has impoverished the province.
Unless some such measure is taken to give the landowners of the province the necessary capital to purchase animals, modern machinery, and seed, the outlook is very discouraging. There is pressing need of such a bank and the people of Batangas will gladly avail themselves of the opportunity thus afforded.
Thousands of hectares of rich, tillable land are lying idle for want of sufficient capital to enable the owner to cultivate the same.
The people of Batangas province could conservatively use capital amounting to at least $500,000 local currency, provided the interest was low enough to warrant its use. Very few loans are being made in the province upon the land for the purpose of improving the same. Loans are being made in small sums for various enterprises, and rate per cent varies from 10 per cent to 25 per cent, according to the circumstances and needs of the borrower. If money could be had for 5 per cent upon land security of double value, it would be the salvation of the province.
I heartily indorse the project of establishing such a bank and earnestly recommend its immediate establishment, and in doing so, I voice the unanimous sentiment of the people of Batangas.
The province of Batangas, possibly more than any other province, is in need of such assistance. Batangas is almost entirely an agricultural province; coffe, corn, rice, sugar, cotton, chocolate, fruits, cattle, horses, hogs, and poultry being the principal sources of revenue in the past. The coffee industry has been destroyed by an insect, but there is a very bright prospect that the new coffee now being planted will be a success. Sugar cultivation is entirely at a standstill at present for want of work animals. Most of the cattle died of rinderpest, and the present condition of the province is deplorable.
Loans made by an agricultural bank would be used by the people of the province in planting coffee, abaca, cocoanuts, purchasing carabao, and bulls for agricultural work and in the improvement of their methods of cultivation.
[The likely author of the above was the Provincial Treasurer of the province of Batangas.]