Cebu, Corn Country
The Philippines is known to be an agricultural country. Most of the products the country exports are agricultural products, among them the maize, otherwise known as corn. Although it doesn’t belong in the top 10 of agricultural products, it still accounts for 10 percent of the country’s top agricultural exports.
Corn, like rice, has been extensively farmed in the Philippines for centuries. Interestingly enough, corn is not endemic to the country. It comes from Mexico.
Corn (Zea mays) is a cereal grain first domesticated by indigenous people in southern Mexico about 10,000 years ago. After the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century, Spanish settlers consumed maize, and explorers and traders carried it back to Europe and introduced it to other countries. This was a direct result of the Columbian Exchange, the widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, technology, and ideas between the Americas and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Corn arrived in the Philippines in similar fashion, through the galleon trade. This was especially true in Cebu, where corn, like the local millet or “dawa” served as staples of the province.
According to Bruce Fenner, author of “Cebu Under the Spanish Flag” (1581-1896), corn was very favorable to Cebu, despite the topographical features of the island limiting its development as an agricultural center. The mountainous nature of Cebu has limited the amount of arable land on the island. Plus – Cebu, in comparison to its neighboring islands, received very little rainfall. Amid the agricultural limitations, corn, a highly adaptive crop that grows in very diverse environments, was very suitable for farming in Cebu.
The Spanish introduced the cultivation of corn to Cebu. Earliest records of corn farming date back to the 1700s. The Spanish altered crop patterns by introducing the cultivation of three crops into Cebu: tobacco, cacao, and corn. Both tobacco and the cacao were cultivated on a small scale and may have figured in Cebu’s inter-island trade.
But the introduction of corn had far-reaching consequences for the agricultural history of Cebu. It was grown extensively on both small and large parcels of land, since it grows better than rice on fields with no irrigation.
The farming of corn in Cebu has been so extensive throughout history that even today, Cebu ranks as one of the leading corn-producing provinces in the Philippines. And in many households in Cebu, corn (milled into grits) is the staple of the family’s daily diet.