This country cannot properly plan its economic future without a Land Use Act.
Sound management practice dictates that a would-be project developer first examine his resource base before commencing the development of the project. The examination would reveal the extent of the resources – physical, demographic, financial and intellectual – available for the project and the quality of the resources.
The project can be the development of an economy, the establishment of an institution or the starting-up of a business endeavor. Obviously, the resource-based examination process is most rigorous when the project to be developed is a national economy.
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The most important resource of any state is land. The importance is greatest in the case of a state like Monaco and Singapore and is of a lower level in a country like the US or Australia.
Fully appreciating the importance of a resource-based examination for the development of an economy, one of the first decisions made by the Chiang Kai Shek-led Nationalist group when it was driven out of China in 1949 was to commission one of the best US management consulting firms to undertake a survey of Taiwan’s economic resources. The salient finding of the survey was that Taiwan, a mountainous island, had comparatively little agricultural land.
The same situation was true of the foundation years of the state of Israel. The new national government of David Ben-Gurion realized that the expected influx of Jews into the newly-established Jewish homeland would place great pressure on Israel’s physical resources – especially its land – so it quickly went about determining what Israel’s resource endowment consisted of. To augment Israel’s limited arable land, it made the Negev Desert bloom.
It is a reality of life that the more one has of something, the less attention one gives to its use, conservation and growth. The city-state of Singapore knows how limited its resource endowment is, so it places great emphasis on planning and regulating the use and conservation of its physical resources.
This country represents the obverse of that reality. Obviously believing that the Philippines will have unlimited physical resources for a long time to come, our economic policymakers – Congress and the concerned Executive departments – appear indifferent, perhaps even hostile, to the idea of determining this country’s resource endowment and planning for the resources’ places in the development and growth of the Philippine economy.
We need to know how much land is still available for agriculture, for housing and urban development, for industrial use, for forest reservations, for recreational and green spaces and for all the other activities that a diversified growing economy needs. The best approach to providing for the development and growth of all those sectors of the Philippine economy is the passage of a law calling for the planning of land use in this country.
A land use bill had been filed in every session of every Congress in the last three decades, but not one has gone beyond first reading. Another land use bill has been filed in the current Congress; its fate is unlikely to be different.
There are three Executive departments most closely concerned in the land-use issue. These are the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), the Department of Agriculture (DA) and the Department of Environment and National Resources (DENR). I have a common question for Secretaries Balisacan, Laurel and Loyzaga. The question is this: How is it possible for your departments to do a good job of policy planning without a law regulating land use in this country? I haven’t seen any of you pushing hard for the passage of any of the land use bills that have been filed.
The Philippine economy does not have the luxury of time. The clock is ticking. The size of the Philippines (around 30 million hectares) is fixed, but the nation’s population (now around 117 million and growing annually at a 1.9 percent clip) is not.
This country cannot properly plan its economic future without a Land Use Act. President BBM needs to certify the current land use bill as urgent. (llagasjessa@yahoo.com)
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