The Sangla Dance: How The Hungry Farmers Feed The Wealthy Lenders

By Roman Gana The Leyte Herald

Ormoc,

September 1, 2004

The Dance of Debt: Sangla Pawning in the Philippines It always starts with a handshake. A firm one. A deal between a Filipino farmer and a wealthy lender. They call it Sangla, a pawning system as old as the rice fields themselves. It’s been around so long that it’s almost a tradition, like passing down a family recipe, except this one feeds only the rich.

For the farmer, it seems like salvation. He needs cash to plant his crops, to feed his family tonight. But what he’s really getting is a slow ticket to losing his land. Sure, he gets a few pesos and the lender covers the costs of his harvest, but it’s not long before the story turns tragic. It’s been going on for centuries, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why anyone thought it was a good idea.

After all, what’s more fair than working your own land for free while someone else takes 95% of what you produce?

Illiteracy: The Invisible Trap

Here’s the kicker. For many farmers, the banks are out of reach. Oh, they exist, all right. But they come with paperwork, forms, and a demand for proof of repayment. Try telling that to a farmer who’s never been to school, who can’t even read the contract that could save—or ruin—his life. In the Philippines, roughly 20% of farmers are illiterate. And according to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, 70% of them don’t even have a bank account.

How can a man read what he signs if he’s never learned to read? It’s as though the system was designed to keep them at the bottom, forever in debt. As Mark Twain once put it, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

The Investor’s Delight

So where do the farmers go for money? To people like my uncle, a "kind" lender who sees the potential in someone else’s hunger. Wealthy individuals and companies happily fill the gap where banks won’t. To them, it’s a great opportunity. Not for the farmer, mind you, but for themselves.

Take Mario, a hardworking rice farmer from Leyte. He needed money for food. My uncle was generous enough to lend him 10,000 pesos—around $180—and cover the harvest costs for his rice field. What a saint, right? In return, Mario pawned his land. He agreed to work his own field, for free, while my uncle got 90% of the revenues from the harvests. Mario got 10%.

And let’s be clear: my uncle was being generous. Most farmers only get 5% of their own yield.

The Real Cost of a Sack of Rice

Let’s break this down. Mario’s rice field produced 80 sacks in its first harvest. He sold each sack of grain for 500 pesos—about $10. On paper, that’s 40,000 pesos ($720) for the harvest. But remember, Mario only got 10%. He walked away with 8 sacks and 4,000 pesos ($72) for months of work. My uncle, on the other hand, pocketed the other 72 sacks. That’s 36,000 pesos ($648) straight to his pocket. And this wasn’t a one-time-one harvest deal. This agreement lasted for five years, three harvests a year.

You do the math. How many harvests did it take to pay back the original loan of 10,000 pesos? My uncle made his money back in a single harvest and pocketed pure profit for the next 14. Mario, meanwhile, barely got enough to feed his family.

“Excess is the enemy of the good,” they say.

But in this case, excess is just business as usual.

The Long Con

Let’s not kid ourselves—this system wasn’t set up to help farmers. It was built to make the wealthy even wealthier. And Sangla? It’s the perfect tool. The lender doesn’t just get his money back; he gets a rice field’s worth of profit for years. The farmer? He gets a few sacks of rice, enough to keep him hoping, but not enough to lift him out of poverty. It’s exploitation dressed up as a business deal. A “fair” one, at that.

Sure, after years of backbreaking work,

Mario finally got his land back. But how much richer could he have been if he didn’t need money to feed his family that one night? How many farmers, across the Philippines, have stories just like Mario’s? Probably too many to count.

A Glimmer of Hope in Leyte

But here’s the good news—if you can call it that. In Leyte, a small miracle is happening. Farmers Relief, an NGO in the US, along with the Palanas Farmer's Association (PFA), and ARIS (Ormoc) , are trying to change the game. For 15 years, they’ve been working to provide farmers with free seeds for harvest, distribute fresh water from their well to those in need sometimes at no cost during periods of drought, among other deeds.

About Sangla, they seems to have taken a step forward this year by suggesting farmers who are on the verge of pawning their land to consult with Farmers Relief's social media first to check if they have a better deal to offer before signing a contract out of desperation.

No more pawning your land for a handful of rice. Farmers now have a fighting chance. It’s not a perfect system—nothing ever is—but at least it’s one that doesn’t demand their land in exchange for survival.

As someone once said, “Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.” But in Leyte, hope is on the menu, and maybe this time, it’s enough to make a difference.

And so the cycle turns, from hunger to harvest, from debt to despair. For better or for worse, the Sangla dance continues. But maybe, just maybe, we’ve learned to change the tune.

The Filipino farmer has been broken enough. It’s time to be strong.

Roman Gana

(Roman Gana is the Editor in Chief of The Leyte Herald)