AVANT GARDENER

The Philippines has lost a lot of indigenous and endemic crops that have, because of commercial reasons, stopped being cultivated. One of these is Philippine cotton.

Textile conservationist and cultural advocate (just two of the many hats he wears) Raffy Tesoro plans to revive the cultivation of Philippine cotton alongside a plan to revive Philippine textiles, in this case, kulambo.

“It’s dead. Nobody makes it,” Tesoro said.

When most people hear the word “kulambo,” they think of plastic netting, sometimes in bright colors, hung around one’s bed to keep mosquitoes out at night. But before the mass takeover of plastic kulambo, mosquito netting used to be made from a type of muslin. “[It] was originally an Indian technique. You’re supposed to use a very fine cotton thread and you have to weave it softly so that you can get enough spacing so it’s light and airy but the holes are small enough so that mosquitoes don’t get through….  You drape it over the beds. You see it in the old movies. You could still see it in old houses back in the day.”

Tesoro estimates that plastic mosquito netting entered the Philippine market in the 50s, fully replacing muslin in the 70s or 80s. 

Most of the kulambo produced used to be made in Ibaan, Batangas. “[While there are a few weavers] who remember how to make it when they were kids, but they’ve not had an opportunity to [practice]—they’ve completely lost [the art],” Tesoro said.

“So that [died] out, and it’s sad because… kulambo may seem like a very mundane fabric… but the creation of it was actually very technical. It was a high skill requirement fabric…. [If] you still had the plastic kulambo, you remember rolling on it and feeling itchy and icky, because it’s plastic? You’d never feel that way with a cotton kulambo. That all went out of style because plastic came in. So we lost that, and we also lost the raw material. Philippine cotton.”

Tesoro has been on a mission to reviving the Philippine cotton industry because it is essential to revitalizing the country’s textile industry. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy. “...back then, the weavers would grow their own cotton in their own backyards or in a farm. Around 40s, 50s or so. They would spin it themselves and they would make it into fabric. So it wasn’t just kulambo,” he said. “That was a loss.”

He acknowledges that there are still some farms who plant Philippine cotton, but the production isn’t enough, and the country doesn’t have the technology to create the very fine thread needed to make muslin. “...there are only four thread factories in the Philippines (two government, two private), but the problem with the government one is they only have one gauge of thread, a very thick thread that’s good for making katsa (cheesecloth), and they don’t grade the cotton because there is no way to get rid of the ungraded or below grade cotton, so they just mix the entire lot.”

This means the rival of kulambo isn’t just dependent on teaching weavers a lost art, it also means cultivating a crop that isn’t cultivated on a large scale anymore while developing post production processes and facilities to produce the right materials, in this case, thread, for the product. 

This highlights the link of agriculture to textile, a link that is often forgotten, especially in a market flooded with synthetics and a mass clientele whose idea of fashion doesn’t extend beyond what a garment looks like.

In the next part of this series, we talk about why Philippine cotton stopped being cultivated and how it affected, not just the local textile industry, but the country’s potential economic prospects as well.