THE government welcomed the United States Agency International Development’s $49-million urban development project to help cities outside overpopulated Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao turn into dynamic and progressive cities.
The project, dubbed “Strengthening Urban Resilience for Growth with Equity” (Surge) is a five-year project aimed to develop economic growth in second-tier cities and move the Philippines to a sustained and more inclusive growth trajectory on par with other high-performing emerging countries, according to USAID director Susan Brems.
She said the Philippine government continues to make significant progress in implementing policy and institutional reforms and has achieved remarkable improvements in GDP growth and competitiveness.
“The Surge project will help cities to plan better, create more attractive and competitive business environments, link urban and rural centers so that more citizens benefit from rapid economic activity, and provide adequate health and other basic social services,” Brems said.
Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez III said that unless the government acts swiftly to upgrade its land governance policies, other areas of the country will suffer the same fate as that of Metro Manila, where high land costs and the lack of provisions for road expansions inhibit the government’s response to the worsening problems related to urban congestion.
“Metro Manila presents us with the most severe case of poor land governance. This is an urban nightmare, a metropolis that grew without planning. Right now, high land costs prevent us from acquiring property to build schools and hospitals. Right-of-way has become a costly proposition for public works.
“No provisions were put in place for road widening,” Dominguez said in his keynote speech at the Conference on Sustainable Governance organized by USAID.
SURGE is USAID’s flagship project designed to support the Cities Development Initiatives.
The project seeks to harness the potential of second-tier-cities outside Metro Manila, Cebu, and Davao as loci of economic dynamism and propel their respective regions in generating higher levels of investment, thereby consequently creating gainful employment to foster inclusive growth.
Beyond the existing CDI cities (Batangas, Puerto Princesa, Iloilo, Tagbilaran, Cagayan de Oro, and Zamboanga), SURGE aims to cover an additional set of six to nine cities.
The conference is aimed to bring together a multi-sectoral coalition from the national and local governments, business, civil society and other groups that will pursue a common agenda to improve sustainable land governance and thereby address the country’s land sector development concerns.
Dominguez said the Department of Finance (DOF) has been doing its part in “bringing coherence” to the country’s land governance by moving to reduce estate taxes to encourage the documentation of land assets and free them up for productive use.
He acknowledged that policies on land governance are “in urgent need of updating,” with the proposed National Land Use Plan “sitting in the legislative mill, with little indication it will be passed into law any time soon.”
“So many of our settlements are vulnerable. Our cities are congested. Our forested areas have been stripped to make way for human habitation. We are truly facing a land governance crisis and we must respond decisively to this,” Dominguez said.
“The Philippines, being an archipelago, has less arable land per unit of population than Vietnam, Indonesia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia. Our farms and cities are built in narrow strips between shore and mountainside. Our farms are small. Our cities are congested. There is severe shortage of land to build homes. A happy compromise will have to be found between the demands of agriculture and the requirements of an increasingly urban population,” Dominguez said.
“As our population increased rapidly over the last few decades, with our land policies hardly keeping pace, the phenomenon of landlessness has become more severe. Settlements are pushed to the most perilous places: steep slopes prone to landslides; shorelines prone to storm surges; and riverbanks that have become clogged. We need to plan for our settlements, addressing a housing backlog estimated at well over three million units,” he said.
He pointed out that unless the government updates its land governance policies, land prices will likely spiral as commercial developers, agricultural estates, industrial and export-processing zones and the extractive industries compete for the use of the country’s scarce land resources.
“If land becomes too expensive, it will be inaccessible to the homeless and raise the costs of production thereby diminishing our competitiveness,” Dominguez added.