“We are tying up with some companies … in halal industry, especially from Malaysia and the Middle East countries,” Murad Ebrahim, chief minister of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), said in the interview, held on Tuesday in Tokyo. “We need to partner with countries already engaging in the halal industry.”

The regional government will be established next year following a parliamentary election in May. Ahead of the official launch, an interim governing body, the Bangsamoro Transition Authority, started operations in 2019 after then-President Rodrigo Duterte signed the law establishing the new government in 2018 and appointed Ebrahim as “interim chief minister” of the BARMM in 2019.

Apart from efforts to develop agriculture, fisheries and the extraction of natural gas and copper, the transitional authority has been promoting the halal poultry-processing industry, expecting to boost jobs and exports to the Middle East, Ebrahim said. While some factories are “still in the process” of construction, more than 50 companies have either invested in the region or expressed interest in doing so.

“We aspire to reach at least a hundred companies,” he said.

To attract more investment from Muslim countries and to offer the local Muslim population options on asset management, the transitional authority is also promoting Islamic banking through a partnership with Al-Amanah Islamic Investment Bank of the Philippines. The interim chief minister noted that the authority has been in negotiations for it to acquire the bank, though he gave no details.

The bank noted in its 2022 annual report that it “waits for the decision” on its acquisition by the BARMM.

Christians form the majority of the 110 million population of the Philippines, while around 5% are Muslim, many of them living in southwestern Mindanao.

Since the 1960s, Muslim rebels on Mindanao waged an armed struggle for independence. With the help of intermediation efforts by Japan International Cooperation Agency and other countries, the peace process between the rebels and Manila dramatically accelerated in the 2010s, leading to the basic law for the region in 2018. The official launch of the BARMM was initially set for 2022, but it was postponed to 2025 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Although the transitional authority has been promoting its industrial and financial development, security concerns remain. Carlito Galvez, the presidential adviser on peace, reconciliation and unity, told Nikkei Asia that of the 40,000 former Islamic rebel fighters, 26,000 have been decommissioned but over 10,000 still need to be disarmed. Galvez said, “We are still confident” about achieving complete decommissioning by next year.

Due to concerns about crime and civil unrest, Japan and the U.S. still ban their citizens from traveling to part of the BARMM area.

“If the peace-and-order situation really settles down, then we can attract more investors, especially from the Islamic world,” Ebrahim said.

“There are only very few areas that are still problematic; generally most of the areas are already peaceful and safe.”

While the armed forces and police of the Philippines have improved the security situation in the region, “the stronger cooperation between the Philippine government and our side will send a message that there is an existing peace between Muslims and non-Muslims,” Ebrahim said.