ON Monday, Malacañang announced that President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had ordered the creation of a “crisis committee” to ensure that the country’s food and fuel supplies remain stable amid the war in the Middle East. While we would like to give the Marcos administration the benefit of the doubt that this is a substantive response to the deepening economic crisis the war is causing, the complete lack of details about the makeup and functions of such a committee do not inspire confidence that this is anything more than virtue-signaling.
In Monday’s Palace briefing, Presidential Communications Office Undersecretary Claire Castro said the president had already decided to form the crisis committee even before suggestions for it had been raised by others, and that its main objective was to ensure that there would be no disruption in the supply of essential goods, such as petroleum products and food. Castro then moved on to explaining at length that there was no “official” oil supply crisis in the country, merely a “price disruption;” and that, in any case, Republic Act 8479, or the Oil Deregulation Law, handcuffed the government’s ability to impose controls on oil prices.
In terms of actual oil supply, reports attributed to the Department of Energy about two weeks ago indicated that the Philippines had, at the time, about a two-month supply of petroleum, with the implication being that was sufficient. Clearly, the government has not yet grasped that not only will the war in the Middle East and its resulting threat to oil and fuel supplies not end soon, but also that, even if it does, the damage that has already been caused will constrain supplies and keep prices high for months or, perhaps, the next couple of years. The time to declare an “oil crisis,” whatever practical effect that would have, is when it is clear the replenishment of the existing reserves is at risk, not when those reserves are exhausted.
The ad hoc, “let’s form a cross-agency committee” method of managing national-level crises, whatever their nature, is inefficient and historically has been less effective than needed. Crisis response and interagency coordination should be built into governance and administration frameworks, but they are not, with the inevitable result being that the response to every new crisis turns into a race to catch up to circumstances. Lessons from one event are rarely, if ever, applied to future events, so the response never really improves over time.
If the announced crisis committee is to do anything, it should prioritize the development of an institutional framework for addressing crises, so that in future events, the country is not beset with another situation in which the government is reinventing the wheel three or four weeks into the emergency. Earlier this month, the Senate crafted a very good plan for just such a framework, called the National Contingencies Plan, presenting it in Senate Resolution (SR) 343, which was unanimously approved. As we pointed out in our March 14 editorial discussing SR 343 and its salient provisions, since it is a merely a Senate resolution, the president is not bound to follow or even acknowledge it. However, it was our view then, and still is, that it would be foolhardy for the president to ignore this resolution.
That seems to be what has happened, unfortunately, and it is a mistake on the administration’s part that will cost the Filipino people and businesses. Absent any detail about the makeup of the crisis committee or the specifics of its intended functions, we have to assume that it is going to start from scratch in developing a plan, rather than operationalizing the sound one presented in SR 343. It would be one thing if the resolution had been at all contentious, and if any number of senators had voted against it. But it was unanimous, which indicates that every senator was confident that his or her constituency among the public would approve of the proposal, as well.
There is still time, although not much, since the crisis is getting worse every day, for President Marcos to do the right thing with the new crisis committee. Form it on the basis of the proposals in SR 343, and set it to the task of creating the National Contingency Framework the resolution called for. In doing so, the government will be able to answer the immediate challenges, and establish a faster, more effective response for future crises.
