TAGUIG CITY (MindaNews / 09 August 2026) — I pulled an old publication from my files the other day.
The pages have begun to show their age. The photographs belong unmistakably to another era. The typography alone takes you back.
But the words?
The words sound strangely contemporary.
In 1993, when the second Mindanao Business Conference gathered in Davao City, business leaders were already looking beyond their individual cities and provinces. They discussed investment opportunities along the Cagayan de Oro–Iligan Corridor and in SOCCSKSARGEN, examined the implications of the emerging ASEAN Free Trade Area, and explored deeper commercial ties with neighboring Malaysia and Indonesia.
One of the conference’s major resolutions went even further. It called on Mindanao chambers, working with their counterparts across East ASEAN, to establish an East ASEAN Business Council — a private-sector mechanism for exchanging trade information, identifying investment priorities, and providing government with policy recommendations.
The idea sounds remarkably familiar today: connect Mindanao’s growth corridors, integrate our businesses with ASEAN, identify investible opportunities, and give the private sector a stronger voice in regional economic policy.
A year later, MinBizCon returned to Cagayan de Oro, where the inaugural gathering had been convened in 1992.
The third conference turned its attention to the Mindanao 2000 Framework Plan, a six-year economic program intended to move the island away from what was described even then as a fragmented approach to development. The plan sought to identify growth clusters across Mindanao, define areas of economic complementation, and bring them together under a more integrated development strategy.
Five priorities emerged from the discussion:
Peace and order. Power. Infrastructure. Telecommunications. Agriculture.
That was 1994.
More than three decades later, the vocabulary has changed—digital infrastructure, agricultural value chains, BIMP-EAGA connectivity, green growth, innovation, sustainability—but the underlying development questions remain strikingly familiar.
Which raises an uncomfortable but necessary question:
Have we been defining Mindanao’s problems for thirty years—or solving them?
Thirty-Two Years Later
This August 11 to 13, Oro Chamber hosts the 35th Mindanao Business Conference in Cagayan de Oro. The official theme is:
“Accelerating Inclusive Growth for Business Through Innovation and Sustainability: Bridging the Gap, Scaling the Future.”
The conference promises actionable discussions around sustainable digital infrastructure, modern agricultural value chains, BIMP-EAGA cross-border trade networks and inclusive green growth. It will again produce a Mindanao Business Resolution for presentation to the President.
There is much that is new in that agenda.
Artificial intelligence was not on our conference screens in 1992.
Neither were e-commerce, distributed solar, battery storage, digital payments, precision agriculture or today’s climate-finance mechanisms.
BARMM did not exist.
The geopolitical and commercial landscape of ASEAN was different.
Mindanao itself is different.
But look beneath the new language.
Infrastructure. Agriculture. Power. Connectivity. Trade. Investment.
We have been talking about these things for a very long time.
History Creates the Future
Another old page in my files comes from the 12th MinBizCon in Cagayan de Oro in 2003.
Its headline reads:
“History creates the future.”
The conference theme was:
ONE. GLOBAL. MINDANAO.
It promised to take stock of what had been achieved during the previous decade.
More interestingly, it said the conference would identify specific actions to improve Mindanao’s production and logistical systems, so our products could reach their intended markets under cost-effective conditions.
That was twenty-three years ago.
Today we are still talking about logistics costs.
Still talking about moving agricultural products efficiently.
Still talking about connecting production areas to ports.
Still talking about opening—or reopening—commercial routes to our ASEAN neighbors.
This does not mean nothing happened.
That would be both inaccurate and unfair.
Much Has Changed
Mindanao today is not the Mindanao we discussed in those early conferences.
Cities expanded.
Road networks improved.
Ports and airports developed.
Telecommunications underwent a revolution that few of us could have imagined in 1992.
The Mindanao power crisis that dominated some of those early conversations eventually produced new generation capacity.
Agricultural exports expanded.
New industries appeared.
The peace environment changed profoundly in many areas.
BARMM created a new institutional framework and new possibilities for investment.
Cagayan de Oro now anchors a Northern Mindanao economy worth more than a trillion pesos, and this year’s conference is expected to attract hundreds of business leaders, investors and policymakers.
The story of the past three decades is therefore not a story of failure.
It is a story of progress mixed with unfinished business.
And that distinction matters.
We Have Studied These Before
When I first began thinking about a policy agenda for the 35th MinBizCon, one recommendation seemed obvious:
Identify the twenty most expensive logistics bottlenecks affecting Mindanao agriculture and industry.
Then I looked back.
Surely we have done that—or versions of it—many times.
Government planners have studied our corridors.
Development agencies have studied them.
Business groups have studied them.
Foreign development partners have studied them.
Ports have been assessed.
Farm-to-market networks mapped.
Intermodal systems proposed.
Commodity supply chains analyzed.
So perhaps we should not commission another study beginning with a blank sheet of paper.
Retrieve the old studies.
Retrieve the old MinBizCon resolutions.
Retrieve the MEDCO plans that preceded MinDA.
Retrieve the Mindanao 2000 documents.
Retrieve the BIMP-EAGA plans.
Retrieve the work of the regional development councils and the studies funded by ADB, JICA, USAID, the World Bank and others.
Put them on one table.
Then ask four questions:
What was completed?
What failed?
What became irrelevant?
And what problems survived every study written about it?
That last question interests me most.
Because the bottleneck that appears in a 1994 plan, a 2003 conference resolution, a 2015 development study and a 2026 business agenda probably does not need another diagnosis.
It needs treatment.
We Have Chosen the Routes Before
The same applies to BIMP-EAGA.
We do not need to rediscover that Mindanao is geographically closer to parts of Indonesia and Malaysia than Manila.
Nor do we need another map showing Davao, General Santos, Zamboanga, Bitung, Manado and Sandakan connected by attractive arrows.
We have drawn those arrows before.
Davao–General Santos–Bitung was studied, selected as a priority route, launched—and eventually discontinued when the commercial realities did not sustain it.
Zamboanga–Sandakan actually operated for years before interruption and subsequent efforts to restore it.
Davao–Manado has appeared repeatedly in regional connectivity discussions.
The question in 2026 therefore should not be:
Which routes should we launch?
It should be:
Why didn’t the routes we already chose become durable commercial corridors?
And before another inaugural sailing with speeches, photographs and banners, ask some less glamorous questions.
What exactly will we ship?
How many containers?
Who owns the cargo?
Who is buying it?
What goes on the return voyage?
What vessel size makes economic sense?
What are the port charges?
What customs or quarantine procedures increase costs?
How many consecutive sailings constitute success?
And who takes responsibility when the ship stops sailing?
A route is not successful because a President, Cabinet secretary or governor attends its inaugural voyage.
It succeeds when nobody considers its fiftieth voyage newsworthy anymore.
The Resolution Trap
This is where the 35th MinBizCon has an opportunity to do something different.
The conference itself continues the long tradition of producing a Mindanao Business Resolution for government.
There is nothing wrong with that.
Resolutions matter.
I spent enough years in the chamber movement to know that organized business needs a collective voice.
Some resolutions helped move policy.
Some became programs.
Some contributed to projects we now take for granted.
But resolutions also have a weakness.
They can create the comforting feeling that something has been accomplished simply because everyone agreed that something ought to be done.
A resolution calling for a road is not a road.
A feasibility study is not a railway.
A memorandum of understanding is not a shipping service.
An investment approval is not an operating factory.
A groundbreaking is not a completed bridge.
An appropriated billion pesos is not necessarily a billion pesos of productive infrastructure.
And declaring Mindanao an ASEAN gateway does not make us one.
Perhaps Resolution No. 1
So here is a modest proposal for Cagayan de Oro.
Before the 35th MinBizCon approves Resolutions Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5, perhaps it should first approve Resolution No. 1:
We will account for what happened to the resolutions that came before us.
Not all thirty-four conferences.
Not immediately.
Start with ten years.
Build a digital archive.
List every major economic recommendation.
Beside each one place:
Completed.
Partially completed.
Ongoing.
Stalled.
Abandoned.
Then explain why.
No blame game.
No partisan finger-pointing.
Just institutional memory.
Because development is cumulative.
A chamber president should not have to rediscover what another chamber president learned fifteen years earlier.
A new administration should not commission a study merely because nobody can find the old one.
And MinBizCon should never unknowingly pass the same resolution three times under three slightly different titles.
From Bridging the Gap to Measuring It
The 2026 theme asks us to Bridge the Gap.
Perhaps the first step is to measure it.
For every major MinBizCon priority, add seven questions:
Who is responsible?
What exactly must be delivered?
What is the baseline today?
How much will it cost?
Where will the money come from?
When must it be completed?
How will we know it worked?
Then publish the answers.
Not in another thick conference volume.
On one page.
The Mindanao Scoreboard
Imagine opening a Mindanao Business Scoreboard every quarter.
Mindanao Railway
Green? Amber? Red?
Don’t tell us “ongoing.”
Tell us:
Financing.
Right-of-way.
Procurement.
Construction.
Target date.
Actual date.
BIMP-EAGA shipping
Don’t count inaugurations.
Count sailings.
Containers.
Cargo volume.
Load factor.
Cost per container.
Twelve-month survival.
Agriculture
Don’t measure how many millions were distributed.
Measure yield.
Farm income.
Post-harvest losses.
Processing capacity actually used.
Power
Don’t announce megawatts merely approved.
Measure megawatts connected.
Industrial electricity cost.
Outage frequency.
Connection time.
BARMM investment
Separate the numbers:
Approved.
Committed.
Under construction.
Operating.
Jobs actually created.
Suddenly, economic development becomes something an ordinary Mindanawon can understand.
Innovation Is Not Always Something New
This year’s conference rightly emphasizes innovation.
But innovation does not always mean inventing another technology.
Sometimes innovation means changing an old institutional habit.
Instead of commissioning another study, retrieve the previous five.
Instead of announcing twenty shipping routes, make two commercially viable.
Instead of approving fifty resolutions, deliver ten.
Instead of measuring money spent, measure outcomes achieved.
Instead of asking government every August what it intends to do, ask what happened to what it promised last August.
That would be innovation.
Perhaps even disruption.
Scale What Works
The second half of the MinBizCon phrase is equally important:
Scaling the Future.
We should not scale everything.
We should scale what works.
Find the Mindanao agricultural program that increased farmer incomes.
Scale it.
Find the cold-storage facility that reduced spoilage.
Replicate it.
Find the electric cooperative that improved reliability while controlling costs.
Learn from it.
Find the LGU that shortened permits without weakening safeguards.
Copy it.
Find the BARMM enterprise connecting small farmers to profitable markets.
Finance ten more.
Find the BIMP-EAGA route that businesses actually use.
Protect it.
And when something fails, stop pretending that changing its acronym constitutes innovation.
Learn why it failed.
The Peace Dividend Must Become a Paycheck
Perhaps nowhere is measurement more important than in the transformation of Mindanao’s former conflict areas.
Peace is one of the great achievements behind the difference between the Mindanao of those old conference pages and the Mindanao gathering in Cagayan de Oro this August.
But peace cannot remain an abstraction.
Eventually peace must become a road.
A farm loan.
A warehouse.
A processing plant.
Reliable electricity.
A small business.
A young person’s first job.
The peace dividend must eventually appear in someone’s paycheck.
That is something we can measure too.
History Creates the Future
I keep returning to that line from the 2003 MinBizCon publication:
History creates the future.
Perhaps it does.
But only if we remember the history.
The danger is not that Mindanao lacks plans.
The danger is that we keep forgetting we made them.
The institutional memory of Mindanao economic development should therefore be treated as infrastructure—just like roads, ports and power lines.
Preserve it.
Digitize it.
Study it.
Build on it.
When the Conference Lights Go Out
Economic development is rarely built during the plenary session.
It happens on an ordinary Tuesday morning six months later.
When somebody asks why the permit has not been signed.
When a chamber president calls the agency again.
When a mayor clears the right-of-way.
When a bank finally lends to the processor.
When a cooperative meets the export standard.
When an engineer finishes the bridge.
When a shipping company completes its fiftieth voyage.
When a farmer earns more for the same hectare of land.
Those moments rarely make conference programs.
But they make economies.
So when Mindanao’s business leaders return to Cagayan de Oro—the place where this conference journey began more than three decades ago—perhaps the most useful question is not:
What should Mindanao ask for next?
Perhaps it is:
What did we ask for before—and what happened?
Remember the past.
Measure the present.
Fix what remains unfinished.
Scale what works.
Then come back next year and show us the numbers.
Because after decades of calling Mindanao the Land of Promise, perhaps it is time we changed one word.
From promise to performance.
And from resolutions—
to results.
(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, this Sunday 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.
Agbon also writes a Wednesday column, “What Now, Wednesday.”
For more of his writings, please subscribe to https://marrizagbon.substack.com/)
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