What can we learn from a history of plagues?

The Philippines is locked in an enduring deadly dance with plagues. Long before written history, our ancestors have sung songs and told tales about scourges that caused hunger, sickness, and death. Every colonial regime henceforth brought with it diseases that nearly wiped out entire populations. As each plague ended, a new one threatened to replace it. Yet nothing has persisted in this country, for hundreds of years until the present, like the destructive plague of locusts.

DLSU History Department Chair Dr. Ma. Florina Orillos-Juan, a scholar whose research interests include environmental history and the history of disasters, observed that while locusts have continuously devastated Philippine agriculture, little has been written about them in history books. She sought extant primary sources, such as correspondences and decrees from local governments, personal accounts, business ledgers, scientific records and bulletins—and used these to piece together a 380-year history of Philippine society in the face of recurring locust plagues.

The resulting publication, “Kasaysayan at Vulnerabilidad: Ang Lipunang Pilipino sa Harap ng Pananalanta ng Pesteng Balang, 1569-1949”, presents a history of locust infestations in the Philippines from the sixteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. It has earned her the Young Historians Prize for 2012 granted by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the National Academy of Science and Technology Outstanding Book Award for 2019.

Drawing from the disciplines of science, geography, and anthropology, the experience of Filipinos in battling this scourge throughout history are elucidated. The cultural underpinnings of locust both as pest and food are likewise discussed in the book. Further, her work brought to light factors that prevented Filipino societies from effectively dealing with the plague: bureaucratic red tape, a desultory attitude among natives and colonial administrators, inability to organize, leaving everything to divine intervention, and, perhaps the most damaging, assigning leadership to non-experts and excluding those who had practical knowledge of land, crops, and locust behavior from critical decision-making.

There are insights from this work, gleaned from situations centuries ago, that find relevance in the current COVID-19 pandemic. Even though a locust plague is materially different from a virus pandemic, both have tremendous outcomes on societies. The effect on lives and livelihood are similarly devastating and the organizational principles required to address both are not too different. Citizens and governments with centuries between them have dealt with nearly identical issues, from bureaucratic paralysis to the absence of technical expertise in leadership.

An important takeaway in this is the necessity of a holistic solution, which is emphasized by the interdisciplinarity of Orillos-Juan’s historical approach. Far from a passive historical account of society during times of plagues, her work showcases how the disciplines of history, geography, and science are utilized to further understand the impact of periodic locust infestations to an agricultural country like the Philippines.

Through the use of the concept of vulnerability (as an alternative to the hazards paradigm in disaster studies), the author was able to establish that several factors contribute to the Filipino people’s vulnerability to locust outbreaks, which are deeply rooted in their complex historical-cultural experience.

Through her research, Orillos-Juan exposed weaknesses in interventions that could be supplemented by other fields of study. As a result, more is being done by experts, scientists, and government agencies to understand the biology and life cycles of locusts; to anticipate their behavior through analyses of detailed timelines of their infestations, all with the end goal of preparing and protecting society from a plague that will be as much a part of its future as it was of its history.

Contact:

Dr. Ma. Florina Orillos-Juan
[email protected]