by JAILEEN F. JIMENO

PAETE, Laguna — Woodcarver Justino ‘Paloy’ Cagayat Jr. still remembers a time when the kabaret (honky-tonk joint) directly across his shop had some 200 “entertainers.” At that time, too, he recalls, numerous fires hit many carving shops because workers were just too busy to sweep wood shavings off floors and have proper cigarette breaks. To Cagayat, this town’s then new, racy form of entertainment and the fires were indicators of Paete’s wealth — and of the insatiable demand for its products.

	CARVING involves painstaking research, drawing and planning how wood chunks will be cut to form an image. [photo by Jaileen Jimeno]

That was in the late ‘70s up to the early ‘80s, when many residents here were hard at work churning out thousands of pieces of wall decor like giant wooden forks and spoons, along with images of couples dancing the tinikling and the ubiquitous wooden beer mugs. The products were sold to as far away as Baguio City and other parts of the country, as well as to Taiwan. Attracted by the well-paying jobs offered by carvers and sellers who needed a hand in meeting orders, workers from Ilocos and the Visayas flocked to the small town south of Metro Manila.

The sweetness of Paete’s lanzones also became the standard by which varieties of the fruit from other places were measured. But woodcarving was (and still is) the town’s main claim to fame.

“Madali ang pera noon kasi bawat bahay may nag-uukit (Money was easy then because every household had someone carving),” recalls Cagayat. “Maraming factory. Malakas ang inuman at maraming babae (There were a lot of factories. People indulged in drinking and there were a lot of ‘entertainers’).”

These days, drinking remains a regular pastime, but residents no longer imbibe as heavily as they did then, which is probably a good development. The kabaret (said to be the largest in Laguna) and its entertainers, meanwhile, have long been gone — but so have the factories. And while there are still some shops, most of these are now found inside homes, employing only a handful of people, and only when orders trickle in.

While Paete had become abuzz again in the ‘90s due to papier-mâché product sales, residents say they were not as busy as they had been during the town’s previous boom eras (which had been many). Today, although it is still acknowledged as the country’s woodcarving capital and despite its residents’ forays in other arts and crafts, Paete remains a fourth-class town.

Paete need not look too far for reasons for its prolonged economic slump. Lack of foresight by its own leaders and unscrupulous business practices by some local shopowners have caused Paete’s woodcarving industry to slow down. It even faces a possible dearth in skilled woodcarvers in the future, as the young men and women who were supposed to take over the trade leave by the hundreds, finding more high-paying jobs as decorative ice and vegetable carvers in luxury cruise ships and hotels.

LYING AT the foot of the Sierra Madre mountain range, Paete is an old town that traces its founding to 1580, by Spanish friars Juan de Placencia and Diego de Oropesa. It has a land area of just 6,301 hectares. The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) says that of Paete’s more than 23,000 residents, some 621 are artists involved in either woodcarving or papier-mâché products. It is carving that feeds and clothes almost 70 percent of the population, mainly because 90 percent of the town is upland and hilly. The town’s name, in fact, comes from paet or chisel.

	BIRD'S eye view of Paete. [photo by Jaileen Jimeno]

Even before the beginning of the 20th century, carving already formed part of Paete’s industry. Cagayat says he has a book of religious items that include an 1886 to 1887 carving by Paete craftsman Tomas Valdellon.

During the early 1900s, though, Paete’s economy was rooted more in Manila hemp or abaca, and was a major supplier of the product. But a disease called bunchy top wiped out the town’s abaca farms. Unable to regain its foothold in the abaca market, Paete bounced back with its bakya or wooden shoes and capiz products in the 1930s to 1950s. Then came a decade or so of Paete artists and entrepreneurs slowly expanding their product line by focusing on woodcarving and furniture making.

By the ‘70s, Paete was solidifying its reputation in woodcarving. Aside from its mass-produced household items and decors, Paete’s famous artists became the first choice of both Filipinos and foreigners who were looking for creative and reliable artisans to render religious images and other works of art in wood.

Cagayat, who maintains an eight-man shop, says factories began closing one by one when the townspeople themselves began resorting to unethical business tactics akin to cloak-and-dagger operations. “A competitor would trail you whenever you made a delivery and then would steal your business away,” he says.

Another resident affirms this, saying that his parents, who used to be wealthy shopowners, lost a string of major contracts to business rivals who cut into their path by secretly offering the same products at much lower prices to the customers they had taken care of for years. The resident says he now works as an ice carver on a cruise ship.

“People kept on driving their prices down so in the end many lost their business altogether,” laments Luis Ac-ac, a respected carver whose shop can be found in front of his home along one of the poblacion’s main street. Ac-ac has a grand total of one worker. His small operation is shielded from the business thievery that has shuttered many shops, since he works on pieces that are either unique and cannot be mass-produced or are commissioned by long-time overseas clients.

While DTI places the number of paper and wood manufacturers at 127, managing this small group has proven to be intractable. The woodcarvers refuse to be organized, making it difficult for them to acquire loans that could revive the industry under the government’s “One Town, One Product” (OTOP) campaign. Councilor Edilberto Pascual, chairperson of the Paete municipal government’s trade and industry committee, says he worked on forming a cooperative among woodcarvers during his first term. He is now nearing the middle of his second term but a cooperative is still far from being set up. There were also efforts in the past to instill business ethics by adopting a copyright system of sorts, but this, too, failed. This in a tiny town of a measly nine barangays.