"Watch what Duterte does, not what he says."
"Watch what Duterte does, not what he says."
In the last couple of weeks, and with hardly any fanfare, the Duterte administration has launched at least four initiatives that promise to shake up vital areas of the national enterprise.
Amidst all the brouhaha over what our promdi mayor-president can’t help saying whenever he speaks off the cuff, the daily task of nation-building quietly unfolds by leaps and bounds under him. As people should do with him or any other leader: Watch what Duterte does, not what he says.
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In agriculture, Duterte wisely put his weight behind the objective of rice security, not the chimera of rice self-sufficiency that was being pushed by some Cabinet members. As a result, rice tariffication was recently enacted into law, and those same Cabinet members have thankfully changed their minds.
As NEDA leads the drafting of implementing rules and regulations (IRR) for the new law, here are its highlights:
One, quantitative restrictions on imported rice have been completely abolished in favor of a 35-percent import tariff. With imported rice prices only as low as half the price of local rice, this tariff captures most of the cost savings from imports and allows the balance of savings to be enjoyed by our rice consumers. This also has the salutary effect of bringing down local inflation by up to 0.7 percent.
Two, the NFA will no longer buy rice high and sell rice low (at subsidized prices of P27 to P32 per kilo), a sure formula for fiscal disaster in this government agency. Instead it will just focus on stocking buffer rice from our farmers (equal to 15-30 days consumption) for emergencies. Considering how often these guys have missed their targets, we can only be glad that they’ll be doing less.
Three, the tariff will fund a P10-billion rice competitiveness enhancement fund (RCEF) to finance farming tools, seeds, and other productivity improvements. If this fund is further means-adjusted, it also becomes a safety net for the poorest of our rice farmers. More broadly, government will draft a rice industry roadmap to coordinate all industry players. All in all, this is the biggest reform program to hit the agricultural sector in recent memory.
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In mass transit, after a two-year delay, the Department of Transportation finally broke ground last week on what is being called the “project of the century”—the P355.6-billion Metro Manila subway project. For those among us who routinely travel underground whenever we’re abroad, this promises to be an eye-opener.
The new subway system will span 36 kilometers, with 15 stations crossing seven cities, taking passengers end to end from Valenzuela to NAIA in about half an hour at speeds averaging 80 kilometers per hour.
Only three stations will be partly operable by the time Duterte steps down in 2022. Upon full buildout in 2025, the subway will carry up to 370,000 passengers a day, with design capacity of 1.5 million passengers a day.
This project is funded by the Japanese (through JICA) and driven by Japanese technology. As someone who became deeply skeptical about the quality and efficiency of Chinese financing and technology—from a number of years spent with the ill-fated Northrail train project—I am cheered by the Chinese absence from this milestone project, which instead features the participation of Japanese companies Shimizu, Fujitsu and Takenaka, together with local partner EEI.
I estimate that Chinese industrial quality today is about where Japan was in the seventies, or nearly 20 years behind. Our countrymen can only be more comfortable partnering with a nation with whom we are not interminably wrestling for control of maritime territories. And credit for this newfound partnership interest from the likes of Japan, Russia, even the EU, must go to Duterte, who has played his China card most cannily.
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In issues of the environment, Duterte has created a Manila Bay Task Force to “expedite the rehabilitation, restoration and conservation of the coastal and marine ecosystem of Manila Bay.” This should immediately silence his congenital critics, who were already dismissing the recent coastal cleanup of the bay as just a one-off media event.
Unlike the six-month environmental blitzkrieg conducted in Boracay, the cleanup of Manila Bay is a massive undertaking that will take billions of pesos and literally years to complete. There are many tasks to be accomplished by this new task force:
• Enforce compliance with the Clean Water Act and other environmental laws (DENR)
• Monitor and apprehend violators of pollution laws (PNP/PCG/PPA)
• Demolish all illegal structures built along rivers that discharge into the bay as well as implement flood control and drainage services (DPWH)
• Relocate informal settlers away from the bay (NAPC/PCUP/NHAand provide them with safety nets (DSWD/DOLE/DTI)
• Compel LGUs to implement the necessary sanitation and sewerage projects to improve water quality in the bay
• Public information and education support (DepEd/CHED/PCOO)
The nearly-unspeakable pollution of Manila Bay has long been the butt of jokes, especially among Filipinos at their own expense. Thus I sense that the President’s real but unspoken agenda here is to rebuild some self-esteem and once again rally voluntarism at its finest from our people, forcing them to learn civic spirit and love of country and Nature the hard way: By actually working at it.
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Finally, in governance, Duterte through his executive secretary has created another inter-agency task force (IATF), this time to continue pushing his campaign promise way back in 2016 of transitioning the country from a unitary to a federal system.
As a federalista myself, I must admit to having also been discouraged by what lately seemed to be the President’s waning interest in this unprecedented reform. Perhaps, I thought, having outgrown his regional/mayoral roots, he’s become enamored of the vast powers conferred by the presidency, which in fact helped him drive through his reform agenda including the first three initiatives discussed above.
However, it turns out that this federalism IATF was created way back last October, just when Duterte was starting to dial down his Chacha rhetoric. In its present form, the task force will oversee the creation of ten different clusters, each to be led by its own national government agency. The clusters will address the following issue areas promulgated in the draft constitution submitted to Duterte last year by his hand-picked consultative commission (ConCom):
(1) Structure of federal government (2) Structure of regional and local governments (3) Intergovernmental relations (4) Fiscal and financial administration (5) National economy and patrimony (6) Accountability of public officers (7) Constitutional commissions (8) Rights and obligations (9) National territory and security (10) Transitory provisions.
I’ve already been assigned the clusters that I’ll be supporting on behalf of DILG. It promises to be an even more exciting Act 3 after the first two acts I was privileged to join in, i.e. helping to write the PDP-Laban draft, then helping to disseminate the ConCom draft.
The entire exercise goes way beyond the simplistic parody to which ignorant ideologues tried to reduce the scale and scope of the grand enterprise called Charter change. As I said at the start of this piece: Watch what Duterte does, not what he says.
Readers can write me at gbolivar1952@yahoo.com.