Terrorists Sink Economic Growth Plans Of ‘Tuna Capital’ff

It has the southern Philippines's biggest airport, its best roads, and some of the world's top-grade tuna, but the shadow of deadly terrorist bombings in recent years scares investors away from the port of General Santos.

The spate of attacks has been an impediment to the city realizing its huge potential as a growth area and Southeast Asian regional trading center which the government envisioned in the 1980s.

The largely Christian city of 420,000 sits on the southern coast of the large island of Mindanao, which has been blighted by decades-old Muslim separatist rebellions that have claimed some 120,000 lives.

A bomb went off outside a local shopping mall on February 14, coinciding with attacks in Manila and the southern city of Davao, and left five people dead and 10 injured in the city. The bombings were blamed on the Al-Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf group.

Residents complain that attacks by extremists in other Philippine cities are soon shrugged off but many people outside the region still associate General Santos with terrorism. “It’s the bad perception of General Santos in particular,” and Mindanao in general, remarks Neil Cachuela, head regional officer of Growth with Equity in Mindanao (GEM), a US-supported program to develop the strife-torn southern Philippines.

The bombings are “isolated cases” and the city swiftly returns to normal soon after these incidents, he says.

But changing the perception linking General Santos with bombings will not be easy, Cachuela says. “It’s really a hard fight. It would require joint initiatives of the private sector and government to change that perception.”

The sprawling, 53,606-hectare (132,406-acre) city, located 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) south of Manila, is a largely peaceful, if somewhat sleepy place.

The most active parts of the city are the ports where thousands of tuna and other deep sea fish are unloaded from fishing boats each day.

At the dockside, sun-darkened men haul the tuna fish, almost as large as they are, on their backs from a flotilla of small, wooden boats. Traders meet them at the port, where they plunge metal rods into the tuna to check the quality of the meat.

High-quality tuna is packed in ice and flown abroad for use in sashimi. Lower quality meat is sold in local markets or transported to canneries.

About 80 percent of tuna output is exported in one form or another. About 170.6 million dollars of tuna was exported in 2003, city records show.

This has earned General Santos the title of “tuna capital” of the Philippines but the city is also a transhipment point for livestock, pineapples, papaya and other agricultural products from other parts of Mindanao to the rest of the country and abroad.