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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the pre-WWII history of the National Land Settlement Administration in the Philippines. It shows the centrality of “the homestead” to the Philippine Commonwealth Government’s attempt at agricultural colonization in Mindanao, long considered as the Philippines’ “land of promise”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the Philippines’ experience of agricultural colonization during the US colonial period (1898-1941). In particular, it focuses on the history of the National Land Settlement Administration (NLSA) before the outbreak of WWII. Established in 1938, the NLSA's ostensible goals were two-fold: to expand areas of agricultural production and to help landless tenant farmers acquire homesteads on the Philippine frontier. Between 1939 and 1941, the National Land Settlement Administration, with a P20 million budget, established three settlements in Koronadal Valley (Southern Philippines) where over 11,000 formal and informally recruited settlers came to work the fields. The paper demonstrates how Filipino political elites, in organizing the NLSA, were interested in the settler colonial experience of Anglo-America (US, Canada, Australia). Agricultural colonization provided a model, albeit a fraught one, to make a postcolony, that is, to construct a national economy under conditions of limited political sovereignty as well as to build a pliable small-holding agrarian citizenry. Nevertheless, the “weakness” of the emergent Philippine State meant that the nature of state-driven agricultural colonization would be informed by the technical, financial, and political challenges of land settlement in a tropical setting. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how the NLSA, as a government corporation, had ambivalent goals. It promised property ownership while funneling “homeseekers” into relations of debt and the burgeoning plantation economy. The early history of the NLSA not only helps us understand post-WWII land settlement projects in the Philippines but also the history of developmental authoritarianism in Southeast Asia.