TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 26 April) — The latest regional accounts carry a quiet but important message: the Philippine economy is no longer just a Manila story.
In 2025, all 18 regional economies posted growth. National gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 4.4 percent, slower than 2024’s 5.7 percent. But several regions grew faster than the country as a whole — and many of them were in Mindanao. Caraga grew by 5.704 percent, Davao Region by 5.15 percent, Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) by 5.0 percent, Northern Mindanao by 4.9 percent, and Soccsksargen (Region 12) by 4.8 percent. All exceeded the national growth rate.
That is the story worth pausing over.
Western Visayas may have topped the list at 6.4 percent. But Mindanao’s performance was not a footnote. It was broad, regional, and suggestive of a deeper shift. Caraga came second nationally. Davao Region remained above the national pace. BARMM, long described through the language of conflict and dependency, also grew faster than the Philippine economy. Northern Mindanao and Soccsksargen joined the same column.
For years, Mindanao has been treated as the country’s deferred promise: rich in land, water, minerals, energy, ports, farms, forests, and young people — but always waiting for peace, roads, power, capital, or political attention to catch up. The 2025 numbers suggest something more complicated. Mindanao is not merely waiting. Parts of it are already moving.
But growth is not destiny. It is an opening.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) data also show where Mindanao’s old strengths remain. In agriculture, forestry, and fishing, Northern Mindanao accounted for 10.3 percent of national sector output, second only to Central Luzon. Davao Region contributed 8.2 percent. This confirms what Mindanao has always known: it feeds, grows, extracts, and supplies more than the national imagination usually admits.
The harder question is whether Mindanao will remain a supplier economy or finally become a value-creating economy.v
A region can grow by shipping bananas, pineapples, nickel ore, coconut products, fish, timber substitutes, and power outward. But the richer future lies in processing, logistics, renewable energy, cold chains, agri-tech, halal industries, green minerals, and regional manufacturing. Mindanao should not be content to be the country’s farm and mine. It must become a platform.
The warning sign is capital formation. Nationally, gross capital formation declined by 1.7 percent in 2025. Several regions contracted sharply, including Soccsksargen by 19.1 percent and Zamboanga Peninsula by 13.6 percent. Caraga, however, recorded the fastest growth in capital formation at 8.5 percent.
That contrast matters. Consumption can lift the present. Government spending can cushion a region. But capital formation tells us who is building for the future. If Mindanao’s growth is to last, it must be backed by investments in ports, grids, warehouses, processing plants, irrigation, digital infrastructure, technical schools, and industrial zones that actually connect farmers, fishers, workers, and small firms to markets.
The BARMM figure deserves special attention. A 5.0 percent growth rate is not just an economic statistic; it is a peace dividend trying to become visible. But the PSA also notes that the 2023–2025 regional accounts reflect Sulu’s transfer from BARMM to Zamboanga Peninsula. That means future comparisons must be read carefully. Growth in the Bangsamoro must be measured not only by aggregate output, but by whether ordinary families feel more secure, more mobile, more employable, and more included.
This is where national policy must change its posture.
Too often, Manila reads regional growth as validation: the numbers are up, therefore the system works. But Mindanao’s numbers should instead be read as an instruction. If regions south of the 8th parallel are growing despite old constraints, imagine what they could do with reliable power, cheaper logistics, functioning ports, climate-resilient agriculture, conflict-sensitive investments, and a stronger bridge between local enterprise and national finance.
The country’s center of gravity need not remain fixed in the National Capital Region (NCR), NCR, Calabarzon, and Central Luzon. The PSA data still show how concentrated the economy remains: NCR alone accounted for 40.9 percent of services, while Calabarzon led industry with 25.4 percent.
Mindanao’s challenge is not simply to grow faster. It is to grow differently.
Not extractive growth that leaves communities poor beside rich resources.
Not enclave growth where ports, plantations, mines, and industrial estates prosper while nearby towns remain underemployed.
Not government-driven growth that fades when public spending slows.
The real prize is distributed growth: farmers linked to processors, cooperatives linked to energy systems, small cities linked to ports, indigenous and Bangsamoro communities linked to lawful enterprise, and young Mindanawons linked to work that does not require leaving home.
The 2025 regional accounts offer a rare moment of recognition. Mindanao is not lagging in the way old stereotypes suggest. In several places, it is outrunning the national average.
But numbers do not build nations by themselves.
They only point to where the work must begin.
(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. South of the 8th Parallel is a reflective civic column written from the vantage point of a Mindanao-born senior who has lived the arc from Ozamiz to Cotabato, Davao, Manila, Cagayan de Oro, and now Taguig. The 8th Parallel North is the line of latitude eight degrees above the Equator that runs across Mindanao, placing the island firmly in the tropical belt and slightly removed from the country’s political center. Rooted in memory yet attentive to policy, the column examines Mindanao’s concerns—governance, development, peace, inequality, migration, faith, and aging—with the steadiness of lived experience. This is not a view from the capital looking south, but a life shaped by the South looking outward, seeking perspective over noise and endurance over spectacle.)
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