“JACKFRUIT is really good because you can make proper money from it,” confides Dominador Villasis, an elderly farmer whose fields lie near the town of Inopacan on the island of Leyte. Nineteen years since he planted his first tree, money from the fruit, which tastes faintly of pineapple with wafts of banana, has allowed him to swap a bicycle for a motorbike and to care for his extended family. Jackfruit trees can be planted alongside coconut palms, the main local crop, and a hectare of them can bring in $12,000 a year, says Joe Bacusmo of Visayas State University.

Leyte lies among the islands of the Eastern Visayas, one of the most deprived parts of the Philippines. About 30% of the people in the region are poor, according to the government; in the country as a whole the share is around 17%. This represents progress of a sort. Over the past three decades extreme poverty has more than halved in the Philippines by the World Bank’s measure. But several nearby countries, such as Vietnam, China and Thailand, have managed almost to eradicate the scourge in a far shorter time (see chart).

One problem is low growth: between 1980 and 2005 the average annual increase in GDP was just 0.63% per person, a pathetic pace by regional standards. More recently a leap in remittances from the millions of Filipinos who work abroad and a boom in the outsourcing of back-office work to the country by Western firms have boosted growth. Forecasts suggest that GDP will expand by over 6% this year, as it did last year. But the growth is concentrated in Manila and the two neighbouring provinces, which generate around 60% of the country’s output. Not only do people in the farthest-flung parts of the archipelago not share in the prosperity, they also do not have the money to move to Manila or the education to land a job if they get there. In particular, many in the provinces do not speak Tagalog, the national language, let alone English, which employers prize (the country has eight main languages and dozens of local dialects). Jobs in rural areas are scarce. Around a third of Filipinos survive through farming or fishing, industries in which productivity has lagged badly. Unfair systems of land ownership left over from colonial times are largely to blame. Powerful families have kept huge estates through their political influence; the family of former presidents Corazon and Benigno Aquino is a case in point. Feeble land reform began in the late 1980s and is still under way (reforms in Taiwan, South Korea and Vietnam were far faster and more resolute). It has created prolonged uncertainty over the status of land, discouraging investment. Much-needed irrigation systems are not widespread, for example.

Poor parts of the Philippines tend to have higher birth rates, as in most countries. The average woman in Leyte will have 3.5 children during her lifetime. Her counterpart in Manila will have just 2.3. Contraceptive use has risen dramatically since the 1970s, but a fifth of poor married women still say they have an unmet need for family planning.

The government of President Rodrigo Duterte has pledged to help poorer Filipinos with all these problems. Mr Duterte recently signed an executive order to speed implementation of a law passed five years ago to make contraception more easily available to the poor, despite determined opposition from the Catholic church. In the past week the country’s Food and Drug Administration was finally able to lift a two-year-old judicial ban on 51 female hormonal contraceptives, having convinced the courts that they would not induce abortions, which are mostly illegal.

Mr Duterte’s government, in a comfortable position fiscally, is also spending more. His first budget laid out 3.4trn pesos ($68bn) of spending—an increase of 12% on 2016. Infrastructure is an important focus. New airports, roads and bridges will appear thanks to a planned increase in expenditure on such projects from 5.2% of GDP last year to 7.4% of GDP in 2022. These public works are critical to boosting the fortunes of the poorer bits of the country, by connecting them better to Manila.

Both the government and foreign aid agencies are beginning to focus on food processing. That is a good way to increase farm incomes quickly, says Richard Bolt of the Asian Development Bank. Around Inopacan, local authorities are investing in frying equipment for both jackfruit and bananas, in the hope of nurturing a fruity-snack industry. Packets of crunchy fried jackfruit are much more easily transported than the fresh sort (which can weigh as much as 50kg). Salustiano Piamonte, a farmer, says selling his fresh jackfruit in the local market can earn 35 pesos a kilogram, whereas selling it to the processors brings in only 16 pesos a kilogram. “But at least the price is guaranteed,” he says. And the fruit gets collected from him despite the muddy, unpaved road that leads to his farm.

In addition to jackfruit-planting, pig-fattening and tilapia-farming schemes are under way in Leyte. All this adds to the impression that Mr Duterte cares more about remote areas than his Manila-focused predecessors did. The president’s campaign against drugs, which has claimed more than 12,000 lives through extra-judicial killings, elicits enthusiasm too. “If Duterte hadn’t been elected, everyone in the Philippines would be an addict,” reckons Silvestre Lumarda, the mayor of Inopacan. He says shabu—a form of methamphetamine—is no longer a problem locally and that crime has dropped. Eleven localities in the Eastern Visayas have been declared free of illegal drugs since Mr Duterte took office in June of last year.

Mr Duterte got his start in provincial politics. For decades he was mayor of Davao, the biggest city on the southern island of Mindanao. The popular perception of him as an outsider willing to fight against the elites of Manila has some grounding in reality. At any rate, his government’s poverty-fighting efforts seem more vigorous than the Filipino norm. He is also a local boy made good: Mr Duterte was born 72 years ago in the town of Maasin in southern Leyte.

Correction (November 30th, 2017): An earlier version of this piece said that the average annual increase in the Philippines’ GDP in 1980-2005 was 0.63%. This figure is in fact the average annual increase in GDP per person. Sorry.