WHEN the vision of designing and building the Clark Green City (now known as New Clark City) came to our mind as then BCDA president and CEO, sparking innovation and creative industries formed one of its core drivers. Master-planned as smart and green city, part of being smart is not merely the city being driven by technology but most significantly, birthing new ideas and technologies. To do this, we donated land to three educational institutions that focus on science and technology — the University of the Philippines (UP), the Technological University of the Philippines (TUP) and the Philippine Science High School. These institutions will develop the brain capital for the country’s leap into the future and will serve as the physical and virtual space where the convergence of the best minds will happen. The hosting of campuses and research institutes are deliberate. We rather host institutions that spark innovation than casinos and gambling. We wanted to build a thinking, inventing and creating nation as we move forward with the challenges of the 21st century. We want to turn the nation’s economy focused on production — not merely on consumption. We want a nation with teeming industries that are globally competitive providing high-value jobs to our own people rather than continue to suffer the pernicious social costs of sending 11 million of our people abroad to serve as “migrant laborers” of the world.
Joining Pax Silica and the Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC) are the realization of this vision we had in BCDA which is being pursued aggressively now by the current BCDA president and CEO, Jake Bingcang, who was part of my original team. His appointment at BCDA is a good decision made by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to ensure the continuity in building New Clark City as the catalyst for our nation’s march into technology space.
It is unfortunate that leftist intellectual dishonesty and propaganda attempt to picture Pax Silica as oppressive to Indigenous communities of Aetas and farmers. It is criticized as huge burden to our environment. The rhetoric is far from the truth.
Buried in the angry but dishonest rhetoric is the fact that the Aetas have been awarded 10,000 hectares of ancestral domain in Clark, including the Sacobia area. This ancestral domain is far bigger than the adjoining New Clark City which has an area of only 9,500 hectares. It is, therefore, false to say that the Aetas are being evicted in the New Clark City. The truth is that the Aetas have their own ancestral domain right beside the city itself.
Farmers were given a million pesos per hectare of land they have been tilling informally and were given the option to continue to till the urban farms of the new city as master-planned. This amount is far more generous considering that these lands were owned by the government. Face-to-face consultations with them have been undertaken in so many instances as well. To further push the development and modernization of agriculture for Filipino farmers, we initiated the development of the Asia-Pacific food logistics hub, similar to France’s Rungis Market, to connect our farmers to the global market and to increase investments in food production and processing.
The Pax Silica is our opportunity to join the family of global high-tech manufacturing. Doing so positions the Philippines in the global geopolitical discourse. In his book, Chip War. The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, Chris Miller argued that semiconductors have become the foundational technology of economic power, military power and geopolitical power. The countries that control the semiconductor supply chain will have disproportionate influence over the 21st century international order. Despite China’s rise in technology, it has yet to match the technological superiority of the United States in the most advanced chip design that runs the most advanced technology we have today. Taiwan, despite its very small size, holds the indispensable role of fabricating the most advanced chips in the world, particularly through Morris Chang’s TSMC. With merely 25 million people and a land area only a third of the Philippines, Taiwan produces 41 percent of all processor chips and more than 90 percent of the most advanced chips in the world. Because of this, the US and Western nations consider Taiwan’s security as inextricably linked to their own. Another small country, the Netherlands, controls near monopoly of the production of lithography machines. Its company, ASML, is the sole producer of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography systems which all global chip manufacturers use.
The Philippines must not drop the ball in Pax Silica. It is true that we have scarcity of power. The solution is to build more power plants. It is true that we have scarcity of water. The solution is to preserve and treat our fresh water sources. Laguna Lake alone, if we stop our stupidity in polluting it, can supply all the fresh water for Metro Manila and surrounding provinces. It is not the case of lacking in water sources, it is in the lack of political will to protect our environment and harness sustainably the natural resources we already have. The forests and springs of Sierra Madre and the Cordilleras, if we nurture them well, can quench all the water that our people and industries require in Luzon alone.
Pax Silica is the opportunity to reboot and lay the strong foundation for our manufacturing and industrial sector. We missed this boat the first time in the 1990s when militant labor strikes drove away most Western companies from our nascent ecozones and brought them to communist China that enticed these companies with the cheapest labor and almost rent-free land. Pax Silica is our opportunity to build our economy on innovation, knowledge and creativity instead of real estate or infrastructure alone which are difficult to expand globally. We have been part of the ecosystem since the 1980s when Texas Instruments established its first plant in Baguio. It must be noted that Texas Instruments produced Jack Kilby, co-inventor of integrated circuits; Jay Lathrop, co-inventor of photolithography; and Morris Chang of TSMC.
It’s about time for Filipinos to have more Dado Banataos in our midst. We must not succumb to the inconveniences of today. Rather, let us embrace these challenges and build a better society for tomorrow — now.
