Philippines International Review

December 2004

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Unsustainable Development

In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland presented its famous report, “Our common Future,” to the United Nations General Assembly. The Brundtland report, as it is now known, popularized what would become the definitive definition of the concept of “sustainable development”. According to the report, “[It] is development that meets the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Under this definition, development is not just limited to economic growth but is made to encompass environmental protection, and an equitable distribution of wealth and resources, with the goal of improving and raising the standards and quality of living for everyone.

With Brundtland’s report, it seems as though proponents of “sustainable development” had finally succeeded in putting the concept on the agenda after years of tireless campaigning and lobbying. The phrase would eventually become a buzzword among governments and civil societies around the world, with many environmentalists, policy makers, and even businesses all claiming to embrace the concept.

In that same period in the Philippines, the advent of a new government offered the promise of putting in place the context for a solution to the country’s many problems. Among these was the worsening environmental crisis. Writing in 1993, noted American scholars Robin Broad and John Cavanagh claimed that “the plunder of resources has been taking place at a rate that is the fastest in the world. Fragile ecosystems have been pushed to the limit. As we discover firsthand, there are few places you can go to in the Philippines without meeting some sort of ecological disaster.”

Already bad during the Marcos period, the state of the environment at the end of the Aquino period was even worse. Particulate matter in 1993 was up by more than 60 percent from the 1984 figure, with the level in Manila almost twice the national ambient standards. Rivers in the Metro Manila area were “almost biologically dead”. The crisis was exemplified in many people’s minds by deforestation. Forest cover in 1993 had declined by nearly half from forest cover in 1985. As of 1991, forest cover was down to 17 percent, far below the 60 percent necessary for the country to maintain a stable ecosystem. Natural disasters such as the massive mudslides that practically swept away the city of Ormoc in 1991, and Southern Leyte and Surigao del Norte in December 2003, exemplified the massive tragedies that could result from the systematic slashing away of Philippine forests.. The emergence and the growing acceptance of the concept of “sustainable development”provided the background and the rhetoric behind the succession of attempts at achieving rapid economic growth while, at the same time, addressing the deteriorating crisis. these would, however, be critically undermined by the government’s chosen economic policies.

The Promise and the Peril

Since 1986 the Philippine government has formulated and passed an impressive array of laws and regulations that appear to evince greater political sensitivity to environmental problems and to be in keeping with the spirit of the goals of “sustainable development”. While arguably still inadequate, many of these policies were considered path-breaking among developing countries and were often held up as models to be emulated.

Emblematic of the newly affirmed importance of the environment during the administration of President Corazon Aquino was the creation in 1987 of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), a cabinet-level ministry with a mandate to focus exclusively on environmental issues. Before, such concerns were the domain only of smaller agencies with limited resources and narrow directives. But with the DENR given bigger responsibilities such as the power to grant licenses for the extraction of natural resources, it was expected to be the main agency for proposing and executing environmental protection laws.

Aquino also passed the landmark legislation called the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP), which then created the Department of Agrarian Reform. Although its more progressive provisions had been severely watered down by the landed elite in the Congress, CARP was still seen as a significant law that promised to redistribute lands over a ten-year period. To address the apprehensions of indigenous people regarding mineral extraction, the People’s Small-Scale Mining Program (Republic Act 7076) was passed. In terms of international commitments, the Aquino administration ratified the Montreal Protocol, a milestone international treaty aimed at protecting the ozone layer.

But more than any other post-1986 president, it was Fidel Ramos who cultivated the image of being the champion of “sustainable development”, consistently employing the concept in promoting many of his government projects, and casting himself as the president who would turn the Philippines into an “economic tiger” without trampling on the environment as the earlier tigers did.

Right after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Ramos created the Philippine Commission on Sustainable Development (PCSD), the first national council for sustainable development in Asia. It was, Ramos said, “a concrete gesture of our country’s commitment to operationalize sustainable development.” The PCSD would later come up with Philippine Agenda 21 (PA21), the country’s translation of the Earth Summit’s Agenda 21 to a practical local development plan. With this document, the PCSD proudly announced that it had covered everything needed for the Philippines to take the path to sustainable development. In addition, the Ramos government ratified the international Framework Convention on Climate Change and unveiled the Philippine Strategy for Biodiversity Conservation.

In terms of legislation, Ramos passed two crucial laws: the Toxic Substances, Hazardous and Nuclear Waste Act (Republic Act 6969), which regulated the use and disposal of toxic wastes, and the National Integrated Protected Areas System (Republic Act 7586), which put in place mechanisms for safeguarding habitats of endangered species and other ecologically sensitive public lands. But perhaps the most significant and most controversial of Ramos’s legislative achievements was the Indigenous Peoples’ Rights Act (IPRA), which recognized and upheld indigenous people’s claims to their ancestral domains. The law even called for the establishment of the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), an agency to be headed by indigenous people themselves.

Under President Joseph Estrada’s term, the passage of the Comprehensive Air Pollution Control Policy (Republic Act 8749) was considered a breath of fresh air by its proponents. The Act banned incineration and allowed citizens and communities to file suits against corporations polluting the atmosphere.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s three-year term in office saw no groundbreaking environmental policy making or legislation on the scale of Aquino or Ramos. The only bill she signed into law was the Solid Waste Management Act, a reaction to the capital’s pressing garbage crisis. By Arroyo’s regime, there would have been ample time for all the laws and policies to achieve their intended outcome. But by that time, it had increasingly become clear that after fifteen years, the passage of significant pieces of legislation and the establishment of key institutions had done little to mitigate the country’s environmental crisis.

What the Other Hand is Doing

From Aquino to Ramos to Estrada then Arroyo, growing environmental consciousness and the consequent promotion of the ideals of sustainable development provided the context with which government and civil society attempted to respond to the country’s environmental problems. Consistently corroding these efforts, however, was the marked continuity in the overall economic policies of the post-Marcos administrations.

In the 1980s, the debt crisis in the Philippines forced the government to sign up for structural adjustment programs (SAPs) with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. These loans came with the neo-liberal prescriptions demanding that the government loosen its restrictions on foreign investments, open the domestic market to foreign products, sell off state-owned enterprises, and deregulate the market. While Aquino inherited two “structural adjustment” loans signed by Marcos, she also chose to follow the model-debtor strategy advocated by a faction in her government and went on to embrace policies that deregulated the domestic market, sold off government-owned corporations and liberalized foreign trade. Aquino then established the Committee on Privatization Trust to implement the required measures of the IMF and the World Bank.

She also passed the Foreign Investment Act of 1991, which liberalized the entry of multinational investors into the country and set out to implement a tariff reduction and simplification program. By the end of her term, Aquino had managed to fully entangle the country in more loans, grants , and measures for structural adjustment, in adherence to IMF-World Bank conditionalities.

Ramos’s self-avowed commitment to “sustainable development” was matched and overtaken only by the fervor with which he implemented his favored neloberal doctrines. Ramos’s vision was embodied in the Medium-Term Philippine Development Plan (MTPDP) or “Philippines 2000”, a strategy plan for reducing poverty and attaining economic growth by opening up the country to foreign investment, privatizing state-owned enterprises, and removing regulations on business. As part of this strategy, Ramos – assisted by then-Senator Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in Congress – vigorously pushed for the country’s ratification of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). He further relaxed rules governing the entry of foreign investors by amending the Foreign Investment Act of 1991 and allowing access to foreign banks through the Bank Liberalization Act. One by one, Ramos disposed of government holdings in key state-owned enterprises as part of his sweeping privatization program. He enacted the Downstream Oil Deregulation Act and implemented one of the biggest privatization projects in the world, the sell-off of the water utilities firm, Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System (MWSS), to the private sector.

Despite his populist image, Estrada and his technocrats continued Aquino’s and Ramos’s neoliberal thrust. Leaving crucial policy-making decisions to his team of advisers, Estrada’s macroenonomic policies followed his predecessors’ steps, putting out his own medium-term development plan that basically contained the same components as the previous one and appointing officials subscribing to the same orthodoxy.

Despite the extraordinary circumstances in which Arroyo assumed office, the economic policies she set out to accomplish immediately shattered any notion of change. Under pressure form the World Bank, the IMF, and the Asian Development Bank, one of Arroyo’s first important policy initiatives was the passage of the bill that would privatize the country’s state-owned power-generation firm. Having been the author of key neoliberal laws passed by her predecessors, Arroyo expectably pursued as the overriding principle of development an updated but essentially unrevised MTPDP for 2001-2004. The plan reaffirms its commitment to trade liberalization, saying that “the Philippines will continue to participate in trade and investment and facilitation initiatives under the auspices of WTO, Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation [APEC] forum’. As before, the cornerstone of MTPDP was still the belief that free markets and foreign investments should be relied on as the engine of growth. As such, Arroyo’s MTPDP is unequivocal :investment laws will be interpreted in favor of the investor.

Consistent Contradictions

The economic strategy of the post-Marcos administrations directly clashed with their environmental programs, as well as with the proposals advocated by civil society. As a result, the stated goal of achieving “sustainable development” was repeatedly eroded by the government’s consistent commitment to neoliberal economic policies through the years and subverted by the power of narrow economic interests. On the one hand, the government passed – but failed to meaningfully enforce – laws to protect natural resources. On the other, it encouraged – and strongly promoted – the exploitation of these resources by giving investors unhampered access and allowing them unfettered operations. Simply put, “sustainable development” became the new rhetoric but structural adjustment remained the practice.

The clash between protecting the environment and protecting business interests is perhaps best illustrated by the explicit contradiction between the content of the PA 21 and the MTPDP. In the trade-off between growth and equity, the MTPDP assumes that increases in GDP will eventually trickle down to the poor; the PA 21, on the other hand, is committed to the redistribution of income and direct poverty reduction. The MTPDP sees orienting production towards exports is the way to achieve growth while PA 21 believes in harnessing the local market as an engine of growth. The MTPDP advocates the “modernization” of the countryside while the PA21 promotes “nurturing the inherent strengths of local and indigenous knowledge.” “The PA 21 seeks to uphold the right of the people to choose their own development strategy while the MTPDP is all for exposing them to the vagaries of corporate-driven globalization. The MTPDP is littered with rhetorical phrases such as “participatory democracy,” but one will be hard pressed to find any concrete provisions for actually putting them in practice.

The inconsistency is not confined to paper. While the pursuit of the MTPDP’s goals was well funded, PA 21 practically got nothing. The PCSD, which was supposed to be the agency for following through the PA21, received only very limited resources and a very narrow mandate. As expected, it quickly evolved into shoptalk and has been unable to fulfill its role as an oversight body, much less ensure the implementation of the policies spelled out in the PA 21.

The contradiction between the government’s lip service to “sustainable development”and its driven implementation of neoliberal policies was easily exploited by certain corporations and politicians who were profiting from exploiting the environment. The stated policy of attracting investors at all costs, the intentionally enfeebled regulatory framework, polus the state’s incapacity to enforce its laws all facilitated the subversion of the goals of “sustainable development”by resource-extractive industries and politicians, resulting in the continued depletion of the country’s resources.