The Maguindanao and Their Economy

By hunting and gathering, the forest provided the Maguindanaos of Bagumbayan with food. This was before the flourishing of agriculture as the community’s main economic activity. From the forest came supplies of timber for settlements, and the wild animals, fruits and root crops for food.

In sustaining the community, the natives later practiced the method of traditional swidden agriculture as an efficient and reliable method of farming. They were able to thoroughly identify suitable areas for farming that can have several croppings in a season.

To ensure and retain the productivity of the land, the natives transfer from one farm land to another, leaving and allowing the cultivated land to regain its nutrients. The fallow method provided the natives abundant and uninterrupted source of farm products, and nurtured the environment’s potentials.

The Maguindanaos highly regard the wisdom imparted by early ancestors pertaining to land ownership and utilization. For the Maguindanao, land is priceless and every creature depends on it. No one can own land, but one has the responsibility to sustain its beauty and essence. Thus, early ancestors did not believe in land titles to determine ownership of land, but relied on its utilization as a common source of life.

In earlier times, barter trading flourished among Manobo and Maguindanaon ancestors. Tuka (now a barangay of Bagumbayan) was an ancestral trading center known endemically as Tabo. It is a place where Lumads and Maguindanaons barter and exchange goods. There were significant Tabos recorded in Labo, Badak and Tuka.

On the other hand, Maguindanaons held barter trading among themselves in Datu Piang, several kilometers away. They traverse the Allah River down to Rio Grande de Mindanao (Pulangui) to trade. Tuka is a small breaker point along Allah River that also served as a fishing dock during earlier times.

Trade also prospered upon the arrival of traders from Malaysia, Indonesia, Borneo and China. The foreign traders introduced to the natives non-domestic goods such as silk, textiles, iron and brass wares, ornaments, spices and weapons equally important to the growing needs and demands of the populace. Trading also enabled the natives to develop their skills in black smith, pottery and weaving. a

(Blogger’s note: This post is the third part of an eight-part series on the Maguindanao people. Each part is posted every Monday starting December 8, 2014. The text is copied as it appears in Defending the Land: Lumad and Moro People’s Struggle for Ancestral Domain in Mindanao. The book, published by a consortium of non-government organizations, has an “anti-copyright” notice and may thus be freely reproduced.)