09-05 S-E Asia 1977

It was the 4th International Symposium on Small Business in Seoul Korea and Mary and I spent two weeks in advance with Bob and Stacy Morrow and their son Roger, visiting the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand. The five of us are in a park near our hotel in Manilla.
During these trips with Bob, who was a founding Governor of CFIB, we made a point to visit with the Canadian Ambassador and Trade Commissioner. We learned a lot during this trip and had a real adventure at the same time. We travelled about Manila on their Jeepneys, which are as common as the black cabs of London. These vehicles were originally made from the American Jeeps left there after WW2.
Our first experience was being propositioned by a 14-year old girl one evening when Bob and I went for a walk. We asked her if she had had supper and found she had not eaten all day. We bought her a meal. The poor kid was supporting her mother and two younger brothers. Her father was fighting in the hills. There was apparently some kind of civil war going on because guards with machine guns were at all the doors of our hotel.
The trade commissioner took us to see a massive development of US production facilities underway in a new commercial area. He said over 200 US companies were developing production facilities to supply product to the S-E Asian market and back home in the US. It was my first insight into what was called in later years the global economy.
And at 3:00 pm when the schools emptied, I could see what would feed the global economy – hundreds of thousands of educated young people in the developing world. The city of Manila literally came to a standstill as these children with their blue uniforms poured into the streets.
We rented a car and took a trip into the country, and were so surprised to move from a modern developed city like Manila into what seemed to be an 18th-century countryside with people living in huts on bamboo poles, away from dangerous snakes and insects. It was a country of beauty and contrasts. And statues everywhere.
At the Symposium in Seoul, keynote speakers said the greatest danger and challenge facing the world at that time were the armies of educated young people that will enter the workforce over the next 20 years. And if the developed nations do not move production facilities to these developing nations, these nations will go communist. And it was communist lead guerilla groups that were operating in the Philippines at that time.
It was interesting to have a prediction by the Japanese that production-sharing which made up only about 10 per cent of world trade at that time, would jump to 50 per cent in only ten years. They were essentially saying that half of the world trade would be giant corporations selling and buying from themselves on a global basis. And that is precisely what happened.