Spatio-temporal migration patterns to and from an upland village of Mindanao, Philippines

Abstract

Movement of groups of people is closely linked to environmental, agricultural and cultural change. Gaining an understanding of these changes in a local context is a vital prelude to the construction of a viable predictive model. We carried out a study in the Philippines to better understand the association between migration and these types of changes at a village scale and to build a picture of how the associations changed in time and space. The study area was located in the uplands of Mindanao. Migration to the village began in the late 1970s. As of 2010, the population is made up of indigenous people (*57 %), people who migrated from elsewhere in the Philippines (*29 %), and descendants of indigenous/non indigenous parents (*14 %). Face-to-face interviews in the village and in the places of origin/destination were used to collect qualitative information on the migrations made by the current and past village inhabitants. The main results relate to the reasons for migration, the socioenvironmental processes that induced the decision to move and the description and explanation of more recent moves. The local findings are discussed in the context of existing published models of migration in frontier areas.

Explore the complexity of the migration for a rural population from the Philippines using sequence and graph analysis

“…The only subsequence that is significantly different ( p < 0.05) between women and men is the ‘…Batuan> Mindanao…’ subsequence which is more frequent among men. This corroborates the results found by Mialhe et al (2014, 2015), indicating that migrants to Mindanao were predominantly men and whose goals were to clear and develop forested land.…”

“…In a previous project, we studied internal migration to a remote area of the Mindanao Island (southern Philippines) in the municipality of Malaybalay City (Mialhe et al, 2014(Mialhe et al, , 2015. A significant number of migrants we interviewed came from the municipality of Batuan (Bohol Island).…”

Climate-smart agriculture in practice: insights from smallholder farmers, Timor-Leste and the Philippines, Southeast Asia

“…This research confirms findings from previous studies in Mindanao (Wernstedt and Simkins 1965;Krinks 1970) that large-scale and involuntary outward migration of women away from the conflict areas to urban areas and overseas is a coping strategy and closely linked to conflicts and natural disasters. Women migrants from conflict affected areas in Mindanao outnumber men migrants as a result of men moving into these areas (Tigno 2006;Mialhe et al 2014 overseas, and are subjected to prostitution and human trafficking. Migration and mobility from rural farms is a key coping strategy for young women to stabilise family income and overcome poverty, brought on by long seasons of low agricultural productivity.…”

Human Migration and Natural Resources: Global assessment of an adaptive complex system

“…The Government then relocated poor landless Christians from Luzon and the Visayas to the Muslim area of Mindanao. These are historical events that still feed into the ongoing political and religious conflicts (Chandra et al 2017;Mialhe et al 2014;Tigno 2006).…”