ABSTRACT
This chapter tells the story of two buildings—the modernist headquarters of the International Rice Research Institute, the first large collaboration between the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and the Coconut Palace, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s opulent state guest house touted to be built almost entirely out of coconuts. These buildings are examined relative to the changing objectives of the Philippines’ evolving postwar agricultural development policies. In the early ’70s, following Ferdinand Marcos’s declaration of martial law, the nation’s focus on subsistence crops—mainly rice—was abruptly shifted toward the development of cash crops—most importantly the coconut. This change, sponsored and engineered by the Philippines’ creditors, most notably the World Bank, encouraged Marcos to turn away from the immediate needs of Filipinos in order to return “external balance” to the Philippine economy. While Philippine politicians used an identification with the IRRI to link themselves to a progressive, international, and science-driven modernism, the Coconut Palace would simultaneously emphasize the coconut’s commodity value and the commodity value of national identity as such.
