In the past weeks, I have been going through the speeches of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos (PFEM), the 10th president of the Republic of the Philippines. Purely by chance or as a natural progression of sorts, I was tasked by his daughter to organize his written works and annotate them. You see, right after the pandemic, PFEM’s daughter Senator Imee Romualdez Marcos had tasked me to salvage, recover, catalog, and store for easy retrieval all her parent’s personal and work-related belongings from their old home in San Juan. After the general sorting and storing, I moved to specified sorting and cataloging. At the moment I am working on PFEM’s speeches.

I have been put in a very fortunate position to learn from the past works of PFEM’ and his wife, Imelda Romualdez Marcos, during their years in public service and see first-hand the progression of various sectoral issues now being tackled by their first born Imee. 

As I have mentioned, on a number of occasions, when she is unable, I have been asked to represent Imee at gatherings and events to deliver her speech. I have also had a number of discussions with Imee regarding her parent’s thoughts and ideas on various sectoral and societal issues, most of which she still remembers witnessing growing up by her parent’s side. This has given me the opportunity to document how the daughter has honored her parent’s legacy as a senator… and I’m not just talking about legislation per se but the ideology behind the legislation, the ideology behind why such measures are drawn up in the way they are. Her dad had written a whole book on the Filipino ideology for the New Society, the foundations of which are pillared on seven postulates—Filipino identity, nationalism, social justice and equality, participatory democracy, internationalism, and freedom of belief and self- reliance.

For his programs for the nation to succeed, PFEM needed a populace with a strong sense of historical consciousness. He nurtured and cultivated programs on culture, arts, and heritage projects (fiestas, performances. Etc.), infrastructure projects like the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Mt. Samat National Shrine, the rehabilitation of Fort Santiago, Folk Arts Theater, National Arts Center (just to name a few), spearheaded by his wife Imelda. PFEM understood the importance of educating and reminding the Filipinos of their rich pre-colonial heritage consisting among others of a well-developed complex society steeped in history with well-entrenched traditional values—a nation and a people to be proud of.

One of the traditional values PFEM highlighted was the concept of “Bayanihan, the spirit of communal unity and cooperation in achieving a shared goal.” It has been described as a Filipino value “deeply ingrained in the Filipino psyche that has become an essential aspect of the Filipino way of life.” 

October is Cooperative Month, and during PFEM’s administrations he fought for the cooperative and the “Bayanihan sa Nayon” concept. Back then, the Philippines was an agriculture-based economy (now we are a service oriented). Statistics in 2023 show the country’s GDP sectors—agriculture at 8.6 percent, industry at 29.1 percent, services at 62.3 percent. When PFEM assumed office in 1965, he wanted to shift the country’s agriculture-based economy to one of industry.

PFEM implemented land reform, where farmers were allotted “five hectares each of land to call their own.” He soon realized an intrinsic problem in the program, “fragmentation.” PFEM saw there was not enough land in the Philippines for future generations if we went by the five hectares per family. “If we are to subdivide all the lands in Luzon for all the farm tenants, the lands would prove adequate only for one single generation,” he pointed out. He foresaw how the average number of children of the farmer (five children per family, as estimated), would leave each child with less land than the previous generation. How can this be made sustainable for future generations of farmers? PFEM’s answer to this is the cooperatives or “Bayanihan sa Nayon.”

From Jose Rizal’s days in exile in Dapitan, who reportedly established the first cooperative, the “Agricultural Marketing Cooperative,” established in 1896, we now have 15,000 cooperatives in various sectors in the Philippines, consisting of duly registered association of persons with a common bond of interest, who have voluntarily joined together to achieve their social, economic, and cultural needs and aspirations.” Now that the economic landscape has changed in orientation from agriculture to service since PFEM’s time and government funding is focused on other priority projects, PFEM’s daughter Imee has continued her father’s support for cooperatives by working on legislation to encourage more green initiatives reflective of current challenges, the infusion of foreign investments in cooperatives for technology and infrastructure development as well as other incentives (tax breaks, exemption from registration fees, customs duties, etc.) to help create an environment for cooperatives to thrive.

There are over 20 different types of cooperatives in the Philippines today, representing many sectors, like the consumers, producers, fishermen, as well as in the fields of insurance, transportation, water services, financial services, health services, education, diary production, banking, agrarian reform, etc.