MANILA, Philippines—Having turned her back on the glitz and ease of Manila 20 years ago to live on a remote island in Northern Palawan with her French husband and daughter, Ditchay Roxas is facing eviction from what she calls “a piece of harmony” to give way to a government plan to convert her family’s hideaway into a luxury resort.

Boayan, an island teeming with wildlife, lush forests and a picture-perfect cove about an hour by boat from the mainland town of San Vicente, has been Palawan’s veritable tourism logo, appearing in countless brochures and travel guides.

Roxas, a onetime actress with the Philippine Educational Theater Association (PETA) and a daughter of economist Sixto Roxas, says she is fighting not just to retain her lease on the state-owned island but to save Boayan from the large-scale tourism development that has begun to overrun the town.

Recently, an investment group, Palawan Cove Development Corp., in partnership with the Boracay-based Discovery Shores, obtained the nod of the San Vicente municipal government to develop the island’s Daplac Cove into a high-end luxury resort.

Frenzied plans

The frenzied plans for San Vicente, which town officials are touting as the next tourism sensation, are threatening Roxas’ lease on the island property and negating the years of work that she and her husband put in promoting a grassroots-based ecotourism enterprise.

“We have successfully preserved this island, kept it in its purest form while working with the local community even as a lot of places in Palawan have gone the way of mass-scale tourism and artificial conversion. It’s a pity the government now wants Boayan to go the same way,” said Roxas.

Online campaign

Roxas and her husband, Philippe Girardeau, recently launched an online campaign to complement their legal efforts to save Boayan Island. They have so far recruited to their cause more than 500 members from the Facebook networking group and collected more than 300 signatures in an online petition (http://www.boayan.org).

“The Internet campaign is really to try to get the area declared a forest and marine reserve because we are afraid that with all the developments and privatization of the islands, there will no longer be island-hopping available, only resort-hopping,” Roxas said.

Development for whom?

Roxas’ predicament is shared by a group of San Vicente farmers who are engaged in a separate battle to keep their “basakan,” or rice fields, from being overrun by a 2-kilometer runway that is being constructed right in the center of town.

Nanay Diding Leido, a member of the Agutaynen minority of Palawan, is the leader of a group of 11 farming families which have refused to give up their land even as most other farming families have given up their claim on the land in favor of the government’s airport project.

“We don’t believe this project (the airport) will benefit us. It’s only the officials and politicians making money out of it,” said Leido.

Leido and her group claimed that the municipal government used harassment and intimidation to force most of the indigenous groups to give up their land, a charge that the mayor, Antonio V. Gonzales, has denied.

The group is getting legal assistance from the National Committee on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) to contest the municipality’s appropriation of rice lands for the airport project.

Field of dreams

Behind the rapid pace of property acquisition and development in San Vicente, a town that was literally created by the logging activities of billionaire logger and businessman Jose Pepito Alvarez in the 1980s, is a grand tourism plan.

The town has world-class natural attractions, beginning with the 14-km Long Beach, still undeveloped but already being claimed by many to surpass the beauty and tourism potential of Boracay.

“The tourism potential of San Vicente is tremendous. All we need is to pump-prime development. You build it and they will come,” said Rep. Antonio Alvarez, recalling the 1989 Hollywood film about a baseball field that was built in the middle of nowhere.

Alvarez, a brother of Jose Pepito Alvarez and a former mayor of San Vicente, devised the original tourism plan that is now being implemented by the incumbent municipal administration.

That plan, Mayor Gonzales said, includes the building of at least 5,000 rooms to accommodate tourists.

“In five to 10 years, you should see all this come to fruition,” he said.

At least two major tourism players have already invested billions of pesos in property acquisition around San Vicente, focusing mainly around the 14-km beach and the outlying islands, including pristine Boayan.

Big investors here

“The big investors are already here. Anscor (developer of the exclusive Amanpulo Resort) has spent more than P300 million in property acquisition alone and Big Foot Entertainment spent over P1 billion in the same way. Right now, they are building a marina costing over P100 million,” said Gonzales.

Roxas claims that the environmental impact of the marina is already visible in the erosion of an entire hillside, filling up the old fishponds that can be found on the road between the poblacion and Barangay Panindigan.

“I do not know if they have all the proper papers. But even if they do, how could that be allowed?” she asked.

Isolated

Gonzales, a former executive of the Alvarez-owned logging company that operated in the town in the 1980s, said the town’s officials have endorsed Boayan’s development as part of a tourism master plan for the municipality.

“It’s a done deal and their (Roxas’) lease is expiring in a few years,” Gonzales said.

The airport runway being built in San Vicente, with funding of P600 million, is just a component of an international airport envisioned by municipal officials.

According to Alvarez, the airport is one of the key tourism projects that President Macapagal-Arroyo cited in her last state of the nation address.

“She had visited San Vicente when she was still a senator and she loved the place. When I saw her again while I was still town mayor, she asked me what needed to be done and she agreed to the airport,” he said.

Selling frenzy

While the tourists have yet to come, the main effect of the ongoing projects is to jack up land prices and trigger conflicts between the political leadership and local communities.

According to Vicente Blanco Jr., the assistant provincial assessor, the margin between the government’s valuation of prime properties in San Vicente and current market prices has shot through the roof.

“The market value that we peg for Long Beach is just around P100,000 per hectare. But we know that property being sold there has reached at least P15 million per hectare,” Blanco said.

Leido’s group has threatened to sue Mayor Gonzales, his chief of police and an alleged henchman of Jose Pepito Alvarez, who is rumored to be preparing to run for governor, for human rights violations for allegedly coercing people into giving up their rice lands.

Gonzales denies having threatened the Sabalo family, which refused to sell 6 hectares of rice land.

Forced to sell

“It is not true that there was harassment. I was even there when they signed a waiver that they were willing to sell,” Gonzales said.

Joanne Sabalo, 20, claimed that she was bodily dragged by the police when the sheriff came to execute an eviction order.

“We were forced to sign that agreement,” she said.