Emmanuel “Manny” Piñol belongs to a family of farmers whose grandparents migrated to Mindanao from Iloilo shortly after the World War II and settled in M’lang, North Cotabato.

Educated in the public schools, he was the class valedictorian both in elementary grade and high school and went to seven colleges and universities, including a brief stay in a Catholic seminary, before finally dropping out to pursue a career in print and broadcast journalism.

In 1991, he resigned from active journalism as Senior Copy Editor of Tempo newspaper to volunteer as close-in-writer to then presidential candidate Fidel V. Ramos.

He was elected Mayor of his hometown, M’lang, as a late substitute to his ailing father, Bernardo Sr., in 1995 and three years later, he became Governor of North Cotabato.

For nine years, he advocated a market-oriented agriculture and jobs generating governance which pulled out North Cotabato from the ranks of the 10 Poorest Provinces in the Philippines with the poverty incidence of 52% reducing it to only 29% when his term ended in 2007.

When he was Governor, he decided to finish his college degree obtaining it under the Expanded Tertiary Equivalency Accreditation Program (ETEAP). He proceeded to earn a Master’s Degree in Rural Economic Development from the University of Southern Mindanao (USM) and he is now pursuing a doctorate degree.

After unsuccessful comeback bids for Governor in 2010 and 2013, he decided to retire from politics and focused on the effort to convince Davao City Mayor Rody Duterte to run for President.

In 2014, he started engaging Duterte in a series of in depth discussions on the status of Philippine Agriculture, the problems besetting it and ways of improving food production.