history

How a wild banana from these islands rigged the world’s sailing ships, built a city in Mindanao, became a wartime strategic material, and ended up in your tea bag.

Ask most people outside the Philippines what “Manila hemp” is and you will get a blank look. Ask them about manila folders, manila envelopes, or manila rope, and they know exactly what you mean. Few realize that all of those names point back to a single plant that grows on Philippine hillsides, and to the farmers who have harvested it by hand for centuries.

That plant is abaca (in Filipino, abaka). This is its story.

Not Hemp at All

The first thing to know about “Manila hemp” is that it is not hemp. True hemp comes from Cannabis sativa. Abaca, Musa textilis, is a member of the banana family, native to the Philippines. Standing in a field, you would likely mistake it for an ordinary banana plant. Its fruit, however, is small and inedible. The value is in the stalk.

What looks like a banana “trunk” is actually a tightly wrapped bundle of leaf sheaths. Inside those sheaths are long fibers, some running more than three meters in length. Once stripped, cleaned, and dried in the sun, they become one of the strongest natural fibers known. Just as important for its history, abaca fiber floats, stays strong when wet, and resists rotting in salt water. For seafaring nations, that combination was worth a fortune.

The name “hemp” came from foreign traders, who saw it simply as one more fiber that could be twisted into rope. They named it after the port it shipped from: Manila. The chief of the Philippine Bureau of Agriculture’s fiber division was already calling the name misleading in 1915, but by then it had stuck.

Before the Spanish

Abaca was cultivated in these islands long before Europeans arrived. Communities spun and wove it into cloth, and some of those traditions are still alive today. The T’boli of South Cotabato weave t’nalak, a tie-dyed abaca textile whose patterns are traditionally said to come to weavers in dreams. Other Mindanao peoples, including the Bagobo and Mandaya, produce their own abaca cloth known by names such as dagmay and inabal.

Under Spanish rule, abaca cloth was known as medriñaque. It traveled farther than many people realize. Textile historians have found it used for men’s shirts in sixteenth-century Peru, carried there by the galleon trade, and recorded in seventeenth-century English documents as a coarse canvas used for sails and for stiffening collars.

Oddly, Spain itself was slow to see abaca’s greatest value. According to historian Elizabeth Potter Sievert, the Spanish crown rejected abaca rigging for its sailing fleet in the seventeenth century. It would take other naval powers, nearly two hundred years later, to recognize what was growing in the Philippine hills.

The Nineteenth Century: Rope for the World’s Ships

Commercial export of abaca fiber began in a small way in the early 1800s. Around 1820, a U.S. Navy lieutenant named John White carried samples back to the United States, and a cargo soon reached Salem, Massachusetts, labeled simply “Manila.” American shipowners and ropemakers quickly found it outperformed the Russian hemp they had relied on. As Manila opened more fully to foreign trade in the 1830s, American merchant houses such as Russell & Sturgis built a steady business shipping the fiber abroad.

For much of the century, raw abaca crossed the Pacific and was spun into rope in New England mills. The Plymouth Cordage Company in Massachusetts, one of the largest ropemakers in the world, supplied the U.S. Navy with “Manila” line. Over time, more of the ropemaking moved back to the Philippines.

The scale of the trade was enormous. From about 1850 to the end of the nineteenth century, abaca and sugar traded places as the country’s single largest export. By 1897, the Philippines was shipping close to 100,000 tons of abaca a year. The sailing ships, whalers, and early steamships of Britain and America were held together, quite literally, by Filipino labor.

The American Period and the Making of Davao

After the United States took control of the Philippines in 1898, abaca remained the colony’s leading export. Between 1900 and 1914 alone, according to official figures compiled by the Bureau of Agriculture, the islands exported roughly 1.9 million metric tons of the fiber.

Much of the new growth happened in Mindanao. American planters opened abaca plantations around the Davao Gulf in the early 1900s. In 1903, a Japanese businessman named Ohta Kyozaburo began bringing Japanese laborers to the area, and within a year he had founded the Ohta Development Company with his own plantations. Japanese planters introduced mechanized stripping, using a spindle-driven machine that made fiber extraction far faster than scraping by hand.

By 1918, Japanese-owned plantations around Davao outnumbered American ones roughly two to one. The Japanese community grew into the tens of thousands, and the area around Mintal came to be called “Little Tokyo.” Filipino leaders grew uneasy about how much land was passing into foreign hands, much of it ancestral ground of the Bagobo and other Lumad peoples. That concern was one of the reasons Davao was chartered as a city in 1936: the new city’s boundaries were drawn wide enough to bring the plantations under Philippine municipal authority. The modern city of Davao, in other words, was shaped in large part by abaca.

A Strategic War Material

By the 1930s, the U.S. Navy considered Manila fiber the best cordage material available and worried about what would happen if war cut off the supply. In 1937, the Army and Navy Munitions Board officially classified it as a strategic war material, and stockpiles were built up in the United States.

Those fears proved justified. When Japan occupied the Philippines in 1942, the Allies lost their main source of rope fiber at the very moment they were building ships by the thousands. The U.S. government, working with the United Fruit Company, rushed abaca plantings in Panama, the Canal Zone, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. Small experimental plantings had existed in Central America since the late 1920s, and the Dutch had grown abaca in Sumatra since 1925, but the war turned these into serious operations. Even so, naval records from 1945 show how close supplies came to running out before Central American fiber arrived in quantity.

In the Philippines, many plantations were damaged or converted to food crops during the occupation, and some were bulldozed for airfields.

Decline and Reinvention

After the war, abaca never regained its old position. Plantations had been neglected or destroyed, plant diseases spread, and, most decisively, nylon and other synthetic fibers took over the rope market. The cheaper petroleum-based ropes did not rot and could be made anywhere. By the 1950s, the industry that had once anchored the Philippine economy was in serious trouble.

What saved abaca was paper. Its long, strong fibers produce a pulp that is thin, porous, tear-resistant, and tasteless, qualities that are hard to find together. Today most of the world’s abaca is pulped into specialty papers rather than twisted into rope. You have almost certainly used it without knowing:

• Tea bags and coffee pods
• Sausage casings and food-preparation papers
• Cigarette and filter papers
• Capacitor paper used in electronics
• Banknote paper, including Japanese yen notes

Philippine peso notes themselves contained abaca for years, though the country has more recently begun shifting to polymer notes. In 2025, the Philippine Fiber Industry Development Authority (PhilFIDA) met with the Banque de France to discuss using Philippine abaca in banknote production.

Newer uses keep appearing. Mercedes-Benz has used a blend of abaca yarn and polypropylene in some automobile body parts, replacing heavier glass fiber. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Philippine researchers developed abaca-based face masks. And abaca has never stopped being woven into bags, mats, hats, home furnishings, and some traditional Filipiniana garments.

Where It Grows Today

The Philippines still supplies roughly 85 percent of the world’s abaca, according to PhilFIDA. Ecuador and Costa Rica, both descendants in a sense of the wartime plantings, account for most of the rest.

Within the country, the Bicol Region is the leading producer, followed by Eastern Visayas and the Davao Region. The island province of Catanduanes is the single largest producing province, and in 2022 Republic Act No. 11700 formally declared it the “Abaca Capital of the Philippines.” In 2025 it contributed about one-fifth of the national harvest.

The People Behind the Fiber

For all its global reach, abaca is still largely a smallholder crop, and much of the stripping is still done by hand. In Catanduanes, the workers who pull the fiber from the stalks are called parahagot. It is hard, repetitive work, and the pay is modest.

The farmers face real threats. Viral diseases, especially abaca bunchy top and abaca mosaic, have destroyed many plantations, and researchers are working to develop resistant varieties. Typhoons are an even more immediate danger. Abaca is a soft-stemmed plant, and a strong storm can flatten an entire hillside. A newly replanted field needs two years or more before it can be harvested again.

Catanduanes has been hit repeatedly. Super Typhoon Rolly in 2020 destroyed an estimated 80 percent of the province’s abaca crop. Super Typhoon Pepito in November 2024 damaged more than 23,000 hectares. Typhoon Uwan in 2025 caused over ₱1.2 billion in losses to the province’s abaca industry and affected nearly 14,000 farmers. Industry figures show national production in 2025 down roughly a quarter from 2014 levels.

There is also a long-standing gap between where abaca is grown and where its value is added. Catanduanes, the country’s top producer, had only three registered processors as of 2025. Much of the fiber still leaves the province, and often the country, before it becomes the products that earn the highest prices. Government programs are now aimed at building more local processing, rehabilitating diseased farms, and getting better planting materials into farmers’ hands.

Why It Matters

Abaca’s story is one of the clearest examples of how deeply the Philippines has been woven into world history, often without the world noticing. For two centuries, foreign navies, merchants, and manufacturers depended on a plant they named after a port rather than the people who grew it. The rope on a nineteenth-century whaler, the line on a wartime destroyer, the envelope on an office desk, and the tea bag in a kitchen in London or Tokyo all trace back to hands in Bicol, Samar, Leyte, and Mindanao.

It is also a story still being written. Abaca is renewable, biodegradable, and strong enough to replace some plastics and synthetic fibers. As the world looks for alternatives to petroleum-based materials, this old Philippine fiber may have a larger future than anyone expected in the 1950s. Whether the farmers who grow it share fairly in that future is a question worth keeping in view.

The next time you see a manila folder, you will know where the name came from.

Sources

• Philippine Fiber Industry Development Authority (PhilFIDA), “PhilFIDA Explores Global Opportunities for Abaca in Banknote Production,” September 2025
• DOST-PCAARRD, Abaca Industry Strategic Plan commodity profile (citing PhilFIDA and Philippine Statistics Authority data, 2025)
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Abaca”
• Elizabeth Potter Sievert, The Story of Abaca: Manila Hemp’s Transformation from Textile to Marine Cordage and Specialty Paper (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2009)
• Sandra Castro, Textiles in the Philippine Colonial Landscape: A Lexicon and Historical Survey (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2018)
• K. G. Pearson and A. L. Holden, “Manila (Abaca) Fiber for World War II,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, May 1945
• Filipinas Heritage Library, record on the Ohta Kyozaburo obelisk, Mintal, Davao City
• Embassy of Japan, Davao Consular Office, “IMIN: The Philippines–Japan Historical Museum”
• Murad M. Saleeby, “Abaca (Manila Hemp) in the Philippines,” Bureau of Agriculture, 1915 (as summarized in Edge Davao)
• The Philippine Star, “Typhoons trim abaca output,” November 30, 2025
• Philippine Daily Inquirer, reporting on Super Typhoon Pepito damage in Catanduanes, November 2024
• Daily Tribune, “PhilFIDA backs abaca revival in Catanduanes,” March 27, 2026
• Republic Act No. 11700 (2022), declaring Catanduanes the Abaca Capital of the Philippines

History often remembers the generals and politicians of wartime, but some of the most profound acts of courage come from those who simply do the work in front of them. During World War II in the Philippines, one of the most vital figures of the resistance was not a soldier, but a food chemist named María Orosa.

Brilliance Over Prejudice

Born in 1892 in Taal, Batangas, Orosa possessed a brilliant scientific mind. She traveled to the United States in 1916 as a government scholar to study at the University of Washington. During the 1910s and 1920s, the American academic and professional landscape was deeply challenging for women, and even more so for a woman of color. The field of chemistry was heavily dominated by men, and a Filipina immigrant faced systemic barriers at every turn.

Yet, Orosa’s talent was undeniable. She earned degrees in pharmaceutical chemistry and food chemistry, and her expertise became so highly regarded that the Washington state government offered her a position as an assistant chemist. In an era of intense prejudice, she secured a lucrative, prestigious job that many would have envied.

What makes her story extraordinary is that she walked away from it. She did not return to the Philippines because she was overlooked in America; she returned because she rejected the comfort and status of that success. She deliberately chose to bring her skills back to a less-equipped laboratory in Manila because she believed her knowledge belonged to her country.

A Focus on Self-Reliance

In the 1920s and 30s, the Philippines was heavily dependent on imported canned goods, despite its abundant agricultural resources. Orosa set to work changing this. As the head of the plant utilization division at the Bureau of Plant Industry, she developed over 700 recipes, preservation methods, and canning techniques using native ingredients.

She is perhaps most widely known today for inventing banana ketchup—a clever, locally sourced alternative to tomato ketchup. But her most significant contributions were born out of a desire to eradicate malnutrition. She created two vital nutritional supplements:

• Soyalac: A highly nutritious, protein-rich liquid preparation made from soybeans.
• Darak: A vitamin-rich cookie made from rice bran (the outer coating of the rice grain usually discarded during milling). Darak was packed with Vitamin B1 and was specifically designed to prevent and cure beriberi, a deadly disease caused by thiamine deficiency.

The War Years

When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1941, Orosa’s scientific work took on a new, life-saving urgency. Rather than fleeing or keeping her head down, she joined Marking’s Guerrillas, a local resistance group, holding the rank of captain.

Her weapon was her laboratory. As the occupation dragged on and food supplies dwindled, thousands of Filipino and American prisoners of war were held in camps like the one at the University of Santo Tomas. Starvation and disease were rampant. Working under the radar of the occupying forces, Orosa organized a system to smuggle her Darak cookies and Soyalac into the internment camps. Hidden inside hollowed-out bamboo tubes, these “miracle foods” were covertly passed to prisoners.

Survivors of the camps later testified that Orosa’s smuggled nutrients were the only thing that kept thousands of people from dying of starvation and beriberi.

A Tragic End, A Lasting Legacy

In February 1945, the Battle of Manila began as American and Filipino forces fought to retake the city from the Japanese. The fighting was brutal, and the city was subjected to devastating artillery fire.

Friends and family pleaded with Orosa to evacuate the Malate district where she lived and worked. She refused. She felt a deep responsibility to her staff and her country, reportedly telling her loved ones, “I cannot abandon my work.”

On February 13, 1945, while at work in the Bureau of Plant Industry, Orosa was hit by shrapnel from an American artillery shell. She was taken to the nearby Malate Remedios Hospital, a makeshift facility serving the wounded. In a tragic turn of events, the hospital itself was struck by a second bombing raid later that same day. Orosa was killed instantly at the age of 51.

María Orosa’s life was defined by practical service. She did not seek the spotlight, but simply used the tools and knowledge she had to address the immediate needs of her fellow citizens. In a time of profound darkness, she used her work to keep thousands alive, demonstrating that true heroism often looks like steady, quiet dedication to the welfare of others.