Davao del Norte owes progress to banana magnate – Guv

Wednesday 11th of July 2012

TAGUM CITY, Davao del Norte, July 11 (PIA) -- The province of Davao del Norte owes its progress to a businessman in Mindanao, said the governor of the province.

Governor Rodolfo P. del Rosario said the province is indebted to banana magnate Don Antonio O. Floirendo Sr. for transforming the province from a swampy jungle 50 years ago into the present booming agro-industrial economy and investment haven in the south.

“We really owe a lot from Don Antonio Floirendo in so far as the manner the province was developed,” del Rosario said of his brother-in-law, who is considered as the father of the country’s export banana industry.

After founding the Davao Motor Sales in Davao City, Floirendo put up in 1950 the Tagum Agricultural Development Company (Tadeco), which was initially involved in abaca production before shifting to cavendish bananas, to become the biggest banana plantation in the world.

Del Rosario recalled it was in 1948 when the then 32-year-old Floirendo brought him and his sister Nenita, the industrialist’s wife, to Davao City.

He remembered the first time he set foot to survey the 1,000 hectares of idle marshland that his “Manong Tony” bought in Panabo.

“I was tagging along with him as his water boy. I was only 15 years old then. This whole area was a virgin forest, a jungle full of monkeys, wild boars and leeches,” the governor said. “My youthful memory can still vividly remember how Manong Tony transformed this once primitive face of the Earth into something alive and verdant.”

Soon after, other banana plantations began to sprout in the province, making Davao del Norte the leading banana exporter in the country. The province now allots around 17,000 hectares for the banana industry, which now employs 240,000 workers and earns about $720 million a year for the country.

Tadeco, which is the flagship company of the ANFLO Group of Companies (Anflocor), now covers around 6,900 hectares of banana estate that produce millions of boxes of export-quality bananas annually.

The visionary Floirendo built Anflocor, a proud Mindanao-based business conglomerate employing tens of thousands of professionals and workers for more than six decades. Aside from agri-business, it has interests in automotives, real estate, resort, trucking, financing, retailing and race horse breeding, among others.

Del Rosario, who once helped Floirendo expand his business empire, said the departed kingmaker was like “a father to me when I was a young boy; a brother in later years, and a close friend in our twilight years.”

According to him, the only consolation to his grief is to see Floirendo’s children continue the legacy of their father, who died of pneumonia at the age of 96.

The governor is confident that Floirendo’s namesake, Antonio “Tonyboy” Jr., who is a former representative in the province’s second district, is capable of bringing the corporation to new heights.

“To Tony Boy, in your eyes I now see the qualities of your father whom I truly admired. Tony Boy, you are your father’s son,” he said.

In response, the surviving son made his sincere commitment to his father, saying, “I vow you can rest well in peace in God’s embrace, dear father. Your legacy shall not be wasted, it shall prosper more. It shall live on forever.”

Flock of bigwigs and ordinary people thronged to the tycoon’s five-day wake at St. Antonio de Padua Chapel in A.O Floirendo village, in Panabo City. Thousands of people even more joined the funeral rites of the “Banana King” on July 6, 2012, with hundreds of children, supporters, sympathizers and Anflocor employees lining up the streets of Tadeco, Carmen town and Panabo City, throwing flowers as his hearse headed towards his final resting place in Marapangi, Toril, Davao City.(Noel Baguio)