CANBERRA — The Australian National University’s Philippine Studies Program held a “Philippine Update Conference” last October 30-31. I was invited to speak on the situation of Philippine agriculture under the “Economic Resilience and Inclusive Growth” session. The other presenters were Prof. Maria Socorro Gochoco-Bautista of the UP School of Economics (UPSE), and National Economic and Development Authority Undersecretary Joseph Capuno. A day earlier, another UPSE professor, Jan Carlo Punongbayan, presented a Philippine economic update.
The conference in the Philippines is held yearly but was temporarily halted during the Covid-19 years. Conference organizers announced that they were planning to hold the forum next year in the Philippines outside of Metro Manila.
My wife, Lourdes Adriano, was also previously invited to this gathering as she used to author articles on agrarian reform and agriculture. She co-authored a book on agrarian reform with the world-renowned and late Japanese agricultural economist Yujiro Hayami (co-author of the trailblazing book entitled “Induced Innovation in Agricultural Development” with Prof. Vernon Ruttan).
In those prior gatherings, the conference was dominated by “progressive” speakers for leftist intellectuals from the University of the Philippines. Having outgrown the leftist ideology after being immersed in more rigorous analytical tools and empirical data (I took a semestral course on Marxist economics in my graduate work at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, England, and taught the course at the Ateneo de Manila), I was curious what the trajectory of the conference would be given significant changes in the global political economy. This was partly the reason why I accepted the invitation.
As expected, conference organizers were interested in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) issue and the foreign policy pivot made by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. In fact, the opening session was devoted to this with the speaker even entitling her presentation, “The Marcos Jr. Administration: From populism to reformism?”
The speaker, a political scientist, characterized President Rodrigo Duterte’s government as “populist, which she claims that Marcos is not. But given the shift in foreign policy on the WPS away from the brutal war on drugs, and a lesser crackdown on the left and the administration’s critics, she wondered whether the current administration was a reformist one.
This made me a bit uncomfortable because I knew that for a state to be characterized as being reformist, it has to institute structural economic reforms. Wasn’t it Marx himself who considered the political domain as a “superstructure” and the economy the “structure” that has a determining factor on the former?
The session on “Social and Environmental Update” was also not to my expectations. The speaker delved into the negative impacts of coal power plants and the current reclamation projects on the environment. In the process, the session ignored the elephant in the room: deforestation and the wanton destruction of the country’s marine resources.
The adverse impacts of these two concerns on the Philippine environment are more far-reaching than the pollution caused by coal power plants, or the damage wrought by reclamation. In fact, the Philippine contribution to world GHG (greenhouse gas) emission is a mere 0.3 percent. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands and even millions of Filipinos are affected by the denudation of Philippine forests and the destruction of coastal resources, and yet these issues were not tackled.
The second day’s opening session was devoted to discussing “The Changing Nature of Oligarchic Politics” in the Philippines. As expected, the deliberation was dominated by harsh words against oligarchic families in the country with the consolidation of their monopoly hold on the Philippine political economy.
Prof. Paul Hutchcroft, an Australian scholar who has written extensively on Philippine politics, noted that besides oligarchic families (which operate in both the political and economic spheres), there is a ruling class, whom he called “economic elites,” that are ultrarich but have not directly engaged in politics. However, they maintain their dominant influence on politics via a network of individuals who hold positions of power and influence in the political domain.
The session’s speaker hypothesized that the growing power of the oligarchy stems from neoliberal policies adopted by successive political administrations. In particular, privatization was said to have enabled the oligarchy to gain greater control of various key economic sectors such as power sector, real estate, banking and finance, manufacturing, etc.
Reacting to the presentation, I noted that there seemed to be a confusion among “progressive” groups on the difference between “privatization” and “liberalization.” The former involves the state selling public assets to the private sector. The view is that the government is a poor businessman and that the private sector is a more efficient provider of such goods and services. Thus, the economy and the public at large will be better off if those services are provided by the private sector.
Meanwhile, liberalization, or more so neoliberalism, is an economic philosophy that promotes free trade, greater market competition, deregulation, globalization and a reduction in government spending. Privatization can be subsumed under liberalization but not the other way around.
In the Philippine case, there was privatization of government assets but not liberalization because the 1987 Philippine Constitution and the previous Public Service Act limited foreign investors’ participation to 40 percent. This means foreign investors will have to tie up with local firms to be able to participate in key economic sectors such as power, telecommunications, water, etc.
Consequently, because of this constitutional limitation, local tycoons practically did not encounter foreign competition in their bid to take over government assets. The competition was limited among themselves or better, among a handful of powerful families.
Which makes me wonder: Isn’t this what the left’s program of nationalist industrialization entails? Isn’t this the fulfillment of the aspiration of the “Philippines for the Filipinos” slogan that dominated the nationalist movement in the 1960s? Thus, I am truly bewildered why the so-called progressives are still complaining!
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