IF YOU want a reason to be optimistic about the future of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, a region long racked by poverty and insurgency, look at Sasa port in the city of Davao. On a weekday morning it is bustling. Cranes stack the hold of a massive green ship with containers holding bananas, pineapples and coconuts—all bound for China’s hungry consumers. The Philippines is the world’s third-leading exporter of bananas. Three-quarters of the country’s production of the fruit comes from Mindanao, long known as the Philippines’ food basket. Between 2010 and 2014, the value of the country’s banana exports grew by 256%—faster than anywhere else in the world. Plantations in Mindanao played a big part.

But if you want a reason to be pessimistic, look across the harbour to Samal, a small island studded with beach resorts and marinas. On September 21st kidnappers snatched four people—two Canadians, a Norwegian and a Filipina—and reportedly took them to Sulu, an archipelago in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), a patchwork of territory which Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist separatist group, has long used as a base. Philippine officials insist the kidnapping was an isolated case, but on October 7th an Italian businessman was abducted in Mindanao’s Zamboanga peninsula. A day earlier troops had foiled a plot by Abu Sayyaf to bomb Jolo, in Sulu; two days earlier bombs had toppled two power-transmission towers in central Mindanao.

Local officials remain sanguine, and investors do not appear to be running for the hills—yet. But efforts to achieve peace between the central government and the rebels of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), the region’s largest separatist group, appear to have stalled. And though both sides appear to remain eager to reach a peace accord, delay raises the risk of more violence.