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Oil exploration:Is Southeast Asia the New Alaska
Related to country: Philippines

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Far Eastern Economic Review
January/February 2008

Manila's Bungle in the South China Sea
by Barry Wain

When Vietnamese students gathered outside the Chinese Embassy in Hanoi last December to protest against China’s perceived bullying over disputed territory in the South China Sea, it signaled Hanoi’s intention to turn up the heat a bit.

And Beijing reacted in kind; instead of downplaying the incident, a foreign ministry spokesman complained, “China has indisputable sovereignty over the South China Sea islands.” The bluster on both sides, while just a blip in this long-running feud, is a timely reminder that the South China Sea remains one of the region’s flashpoints. What most observers don’t realize is that in the last few years, regional cooperative efforts to coax Beijing into a more measured stance have been set back by one of the rival claimants to the islands.

Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s hurried trip to China in late 2004 produced a major surprise. Among the raft of agreements ceremoniously signed by the two countries was one providing for their national oil companies to conduct a joint seismic study in the contentious South China Sea, a prospect that caused consternation in parts of Southeast Asia. Within six months, however, Vietnam, the harshest critic, dropped its objections and joined the venture, which went ahead on a tripartite basis and shrouded in secrecy.

In the absence of any progress towards solving complex territorial and jurisdictional disputes in the South China Sea, the concept of joint development is resonating stronger than ever. The idea is fairly simple: Shelve sovereignty claims temporarily and establish joint development zones to share the ocean’s fish, hydrocarbon and other resources. The agreement between China, the Philippines and Vietnam, three of the six governments that have conflicting claims, is seen as a step in the right direction and a possible model for the future.

But as details of the undertaking emerge, it is beginning to look like anything but the way to go. For a start, the Philippine government has broken ranks with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, which was dealing with China as a bloc on the South China Sea issue. The Philippines also has made breathtaking concessions in agreeing to the area for study, including parts of its own continental shelf not even claimed by China and Vietnam. Through its actions, Manila has given a certain legitimacy to China’s legally spurious “historic claim” to most of the South China Sea.

Although the South China Sea has been relatively peaceful for the past decade, it remains one of East Asia’s potential flashpoints. The Paracel Islands in the northwest are claimed by China and Vietnam, while the Spratly Islands in the south are claimed in part or entirety by China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Brunei. All but Brunei, whose claim is limited to an exclusive economic zone and a continental shelf that overlap those of its neighbors, man military garrisons in the scattered islets, cays and rocks of the Spratlys.

After extensive Chinese structures were discovered in 1995 on Mischief Reef, on the Philippine continental shelf and well within the Philippine 200-nautical- mile exclusive economic zone, Asean persuaded Beijing to drop its resistance to the “internationalizatio n” of the South China Sea issue. Instead of insisting on only bilateral discussions with claimant states, China agreed to deal with Asean as a group on the matter. Rodolfo Severino, a former secretary-general of Asean, has lauded “Asean solidarity and cooperation in a matter of vital security concern.”

Asean and China, however, failed in their attempt to negotiate a code of conduct. In the “Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea,” signed in 2002, they pledged to settle territorial disagreements peacefully and to exercise restraint in activities that could spark conflict. But the declaration is far from watertight. A political statement, not a legally binding treaty, it doesn’t specify the geographical scope and is, at best, an interim step.

Since the issuance of the declaration, a tenuous stability has descended on the South China Sea. With Asean countries benefiting from China’s booming economy, boosted by a free-trade agreement, Southeast Asian political leaders are happy to forget about this particular set of problems that once bedeviled their relations with Beijing. Yet none of the multifaceted disputes has been resolved, and no mechanism exists to prevent or manage conflicts. With no plans to discuss even the sovereignty of contested islands, claimants now accept that it will be decades, perhaps generations, before the tangled claims are reconciled.

Recent incidents and skirmishes are a sharp reminder of how dangerous the situation remains. In the middle of last year, Chinese naval vessels fired on Vietnamese fishing boats near the Paracels, killing one fisherman and wounding six others, while British giant BP halted work associated with a gas pipeline off the Vietnamese coast after a warning by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. In the past few months, Beijing and Hanoi have traded denunciations as the Chinese, in particular, maneuver to reinforce territorial claims. Vietnam protested when China conducted a large naval exercise around the Paracels in November.

China’s decision in December to create an administrative center on Hainan to manage the Paracels, Spratlys and another archipelago, though symbolic, was regarded as particularly provocative by Hanoi. The Vietnamese authorities facilitated demonstrations outside the Chinese diplomatic missions in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to make known their displeasure.

Friction can be expected to increase as the demand for energy by China and dynamic Southeast Asian economies rises and they intensify the search for oil and gas. While hydrocarbon reserves in the South China Sea are unproven, the belief that huge deposits exist keeps interest intense. As world oil prices hit record levels, the discovery of commercially viable reserves would raise tensions and “transform security circumstances” in the Spratlys, according to Ralf Emmers, an associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

President Arroyo’s agreement with China for a joint seismic study was controversial in several respects. By not consulting other Asean members beforehand, the Philippines abandoned the collective stance that was key to the group’s success with China over the South China Sea. Ironically, it was Manila that first sought a united front and rallied Asean to confront China over its intrusion into Mischief Reef a decade earlier. Sold the idea by politicians with business links who have other deals going with the Chinese, Ms. Arroyo did not seek the views of her foreign ministry, Philippines officials say. By the time the foreign ministry heard about it and objected, it was too late, the officials say.

Philippine diplomats might have been able to warn her that while joint development has been successfully implemented elsewhere, Beijing’s understanding of the concept is peculiarly Chinese. The only location that China is known to have nominated for joint development is a patch off the southern coast of Vietnam called Vanguard Bank, which is in Vietnamese waters where China has “no possibly valid claim,” as a study by a U.S. law firm put it. Beijing’s suggestion in the 1990s that it and Hanoi jointly develop Vanguard Bank was considered doubly outrageous because China insisted that it alone must retain sovereignty of the area. Also of no small consideration was the fact that such a bilateral deal would split Southeast Asia.

The hollowness of China’s policy of joint development, loudly proclaimed for nearly 20 years, was confirmed long ago by Hasjim Djalal, Indonesia’s foremost authority on maritime affairs, when he headed a series of workshops on the South China Sea. Mr. Hasjim set out to test the concept of joint development, taking several years to identify an area in which each country would both relinquish and gain something in terms of its claims. In 1996, he designated an area of some thousands of square kilometers, amounting to a small opening in the middle of the South China Sea, which cut across the Spratlys and went beyond them. Joint development, unspecified, was to take place in the “hole,” with no participant having to formally abandon its claims. Beijing alone refused to further explore the doughnut proposal, as it was dubbed, complaining that the intended zone was in the area China claimed. Of course it was, that being the essence of the plan, without which it was difficult to imagine having joint development.

China’s bottom line on joint development at that time: What is mine is mine and what is yours is ours.

Beijing and Manila did not make public the text of their “Agreement for Seismic Undertaking for Certain Areas in the South China Sea By and Between China National Offshore Oil Corporation and Philippine National Oil Company.” After the agreement was signed on Sept. 1, 2004, the Philippine government said the joint seismic study, lasting three years, would “gather and process data on stratigraphy, tectonics and structural fabric of the subsurface of the area.”

Although the government said the undertaking “has no reference to petroleum exploration and production,” it was obvious that the survey was intended precisely to gauge prospects for oil and gas exploration and production. Nobody could think of an alternative explanation for seismic work, especially in the wake of year-earlier press reports that CNOOC and PNOC had signed a letter of intent to begin the search for oil and gas.

Vietnam immediately voiced concern, declaring that the agreement, concluded without consultation, was not in keeping with the spirit of the 2002 Asean-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties. Hanoi “requested” Beijing and Manila disclose what they had agreed and called on other Asean members to join Vietnam in “strictly implementing” the declaration. After what Hanoi National University law lecturer Nguyen Hong Thao calls “six months of Vietnamese active struggle, supported by other countries,” state-owned PetroVietnam joined the China-Philippine pact.

Vietnam’s inclusion in the modified and renamed “Tripartite Agreement for Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking in the Agreement Area in the South China Sea,” signed on March 14, 2005, was scarcely a victory for consensus-building and voluntary restraint. The Philippines, militarily weak and lagging economically, had opted for Chinese favors at the expense of Asean political solidarity. In danger of being cut out, the Vietnamese joined, “seeking to make the best out of an unsatisfactory situation,” as Mr. Severino puts it. The transparency that Hanoi had demanded was still missing, with even the site of the proposed seismic study concealed.

Now that the location is known, the details having leaked into research circles, the reasons for wanting to keep it under wraps are apparent: “Some would say it was a sell-out on the part of the Philippines,” says Mark Valencia, an independent expert on the South China Sea. The designated zone, a vast swathe of ocean off Palawan in the southern Philippines, thrusts into the Spratlys and abuts Malampaya, a Philippine producing gas field. About one-sixth of the entire area, closest to the Philippine coastline, is outside the claims by China and Vietnam. Says Mr. Valencia: “Presumably for higher political purposes, the Philippines agreed to these joint surveys that include parts of its legal continental shelf that China and Vietnam don’t even claim.”

Worse, by agreeing to joint surveying, Manila implicitly considers the Chinese and Vietnamese claims to have a legitimate basis, he says. In the case of Beijing, this has serious implications, since the broken, U-shaped line on Chinese maps, claiming almost the entire South China Sea on “historic” grounds, is nonsensical in international law. (Theoretically, Beijing might stake an alternative claim based on an exclusive economic zone and continental shelf from nearby islets that it claims, but they would be restricted by similar claims by rivals.) Manila’s support for the Chinese “historic claim,” however indirect, weakens the positions of fellow Asean members Malaysia and Brunei, whose claimed areas are partly within the Chinese U-shaped line. It is a stunning about-face by Manila, which kicked up an international fuss in 1995 when the Chinese moved onto the submerged Mischief Reef on the same underlying “historic claim” to the area.

Some commentators have hailed the tripartite seismic survey as a landmark event, echoing the upbeat interpretation put on it by the Philippines and China. The parties insist it is a strictly commercial venture by their national oil companies that does not change the sovereignty claims of the three countries involved. Ms. Arroyo calls it an “historic diplomatic breakthrough for peace and security in the region.” But that assessment is, at the very least, premature.

Not only do the details of the three-way agreement remain unknown, but almost nothing has been disclosed about progress on the seismic study, which should be completed in the next few months. Much will depend on the results and what the parties do next. Already, according to regional officials, China has approached Malaysia and Brunei separately, suggesting similar joint ventures. If it is confirmed that China has split Asean and the Southeast Asian claimants and won the right to jointly develop areas of the South China Sea it covets only by virtue of its “historic claim,” Beijing will have scored a significant victory.

Mr. Wain, writer-in-residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, is a former editor of The Wall Street Journal Asia.

March 7, 2008 | 11:09 PM Comments  0 comments



Corruption: RP territory in GMA deal delineated
Related to country: Philippines

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

RP territory in GMA deal delineated

THE joint seismic study agreement the Philippines struck with China in 2004 preparatory to oil exploration in the disputed Spratlys covers an area that laps the western shores of Philippines, Malaya was able to establish yesterday.

The agreement has been kept secret by the Philippine government, but Malaya was able to secure a copy of Annex "A" which delineates the boundaries of the area covered.

At its farthermost eastern edge, the area is around 25 kilometers from the southern tip of Palawan. At its northern boundary, the area abuts the Malampaya oil field and includes an area the Philippines had long awarded to a British company for oil exploration.

Of the total 142,886 kilometers, around 24,000 square kilometers clearly belong to the Philippines and fall outside the areas in the Spratlys which are claimed either in whole or in part by the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia and Brunei.

The area also swallows almost 80 percent of the Kalayaan Group which the Philippines claims.

The Spratly island itself, which serves as the reference when referring to the Spratly Group, is at the westernmost edge area covered by the agreement. The island is about 700 kilometers from Palawan.

Malaya publisher Amado Macasaet, in an article, has said that President Arroyo and then Speaker Jose de Venecia might be held liable for treason for signing the agreement in exchange for loans "attended by bribery and corruption."

Resolutions have been filed at both the Senate and the House calling for an inquiry into the "sellout" of Philippine territory.

Cabinet secretary Ricardo Saludo dared critics to question the Spratly deal before the Supreme Court instead of citing what he called hearsay.

"Why does the opposition keep resorting to press statements and partisan hearings? Is it afraid of impartial due process?" he said.

He said former Senate President Franklin Drilon, being a topnotch lawyer and former justice secretary, should "know how to test the validity of any agreement."

Drilon, in a television interview, has said he was formally informed that the approval of the Chinese loan for the $500 million NorthRail project was tied to the Spratly deal.

Vice President Noli de Castro said he wants to hear the side of Malacañang and the Department of Foreign Affairs, adding that all he knows about the deal is based on media reports.

The Joint Marine Seismic Undertaking (JMSU) was signed on Sept. 1, 2004 between the China National Offshore Oil Corp. and the Philippine National Oil Corp., reportedly in exchange for billions worth of soft loans for projects like the national broadband network project, the cyber education project, and the North and South Rail projects.

Vietnam initially denounced the agreement, but came on board in March 2005.

The DFA has explained that the JMSU, which includes conduct of joint explorations and similar activities among the three Spratly claimants (China, Vietnam and the Philippines) , does not impinge on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Philippines.

It said JMSU is "a landmark agreement that affirms the political commitment of three claimant states to approach their disputes in the South China Sea in a peaceful and constructive manner." The Philippines and China were the first signatories to the JMSU. Vietnam later joined in the agreement.

Rep. Roilo Golez (Ind. Parañaque) said De Venecia must come out and tell everything he knows about the "origins and background" of the Spratly deal.

Golez and detained Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV have filed separate resolutions calling for a probe.

Golez said De Venecia should explain whether there is truth to the insinuation that there is a link between this agreement and China’s soft loan facility of $2 billion a year for controversial and allegedly overpriced projects like NorthRail, SouthRail, NBN-ZTE, among others."

"The former Speaker must also clarify if there were other top officials who intervened in the signing of the deal. Knowing the decision-making process for deals of this nature, I cannot believe that the Speaker alone can swing this without Malacañang’s approval," he said.

De Venecia has denied that the deal was forged in exchange for loans. He added the deal would even avert a potential conflict that may arise in the Spratlys.

De Venecia said that after the seismic data-gathering, it would only be logical to begin exploratory oil drilling which he said is very much needed in the face of the sky-rocketing prices of oil products.

Golez said the Spratlys is believed to contain oil reserves of around 200 billion barrels which at present oil price level would translate to around $20 trillion.

Rep. Orlando Fua (Lakas, Siquijor), senior vice chair of the committee on foreign affairs, on Wednesday night said in the plenary that the DFA has been lobbying against the passage of House Bill 3216 which defines the Philippines’ archipelagic baseline, including the Kalayaan Group of Islands and the Scarborough Shoal in the Spratlys.

Fua said this is the reason the House has not approved the bill on final reading despite its inclusion in the agenda.

Sources said the DFA does not want the House version because this would antagonize the Chinese who have been providing loans to the Philippines.

ALARMING

Senate majority leader Francis Pangilinan said if the Spratly deal is indeed tainted by anomaly, "then we must all be alarmed because then we will find that the Filipino people need to protect themselves from their very own government."

Pangilinan said the Philippines entered into 31 agreements with China last year to promote bilateral trade and development in the next 10 years. These include the agreement to jointly undertake seismic studies of the Spratlys and explore the territory for oil and natural gas.

According to reports, the Chinese government committed $2 billion in official development assistance every year to the Republic of the Philippines until 2010 after the deal was signed.

Senators have said that the 67 bilateral agreements which the Arroyo administration signed with China seem to be a "precondition to the bilateral loan agreements granted by China to the Philippines to finance the government’s overpriced and anomalous projects such as the NBN-ZTE contract and the North Rail project.

Of the 67 bilateral agreements, 57 were signed after Aug. 31, 2003 or after talks were opened relative to China’s oil and gas exploration of Spratly Islands.

OF NO VALUE

The National Union of People’s Lawyers said Malacañang’s challenge to bring the Spratly deal before the courts is meaningless and "of no value."

Neri Javier Colmenares, the group’s secretary general, said no suit against the JMSU can be filed "unless President Arroyo allows officials, including Chairman Romulo Neri, to testify, and the negotiations leading to the JMSU, including the Agreement itself, are made transparent and publicly submitted to the Senate investigation. "

Colmenares nevertheless said the JMSU is "void if signed by President Arroyo and the Chinese government in consideration of fraudulent transactions in the various projects and loan agreements involving Chinese companies."

"In fact, due to the fraudulent transactions accompanying the loan agreements, the Philippine has every right to demand the voidance of the loans should fraud be proved between the two parties," he said. – Jocelyn Montemayor, Wendell Vigilia, JP Lopez and Anthony Ian Cruz

March 7, 2008 | 10:58 PM Comments  0 comments



quote of the Day
Related to country: Uganda

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

As I was reading an essay by Arundhati Roy, I came across an elegant quote that I once gazed upon in highschool:

"The Rule of Law does not do away with unequal distribution of wealth and power, but reinforces that inequality with the authority of law. It allocates wealth and poverty in such indirect and complicated ways as to leave the victim bewildered."
-Howard Zinn

February 16, 2008 | 10:42 AM Comments  0 comments



WORLD BANK INTERNATIONAL ESSAY CONTEST 2008
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Anyone interested in an International Essay contest on global urbanization? For more information: http://www.essaycompetition.org/content08_47_1

It's open to all those 18-25 years of age. Here are the essay questions:
1) Think about the city you live in. What are the biggest opportunities and challenges for people living there?

2) What needs to be done to transform your city into the city of your dreams?

3) What could be your role, working together with your peers, in shaping the city of your dreams? Please focus on one or two points you mentioned in question 2).
Share your practical ideas today!

February 13, 2008 | 10:20 PM Comments  0 comments



The Philippines at the Frontlines of Global Warming
Related to country: Philippines

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic


18 December 2007
BALI: A MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Statement of Dr. Walden Bello*, President of the Freedom from Debt Coalition

The gap between the urgent threat of global warming and the collective will to do something about it has never been greater. The recently concluded Conference on Climate Change in Bali was a grand opportunity to act. Instead, it was another missed opportunity. Unfortunately, the United States played a very negative role, standing in the way of consensus at every turn. And unfortunately, the rest of the world thought that seducing the US into a new agreement on climate action was top priority, resulting in a Bali Roadmap that was very sketchy.

A Roadmap to Anywhere

The US was brought back to the fold, but at the cost of excising from the final document--the so-called Bali Roadmap--any reference to the need for a 25 to 40 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 to keep the mean global temperature increase to 2.0 to 2.4 degrees Celsius in the 21st century.

Reference to quantitative figures was reduced to a footnote referring readers to some pages in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2007 Report which simply enumerate several climate stabilization scenarios. The alternative scenarios ranged from a 2.0 to 2.4 degree rise in temperature to a 4.9 to 6.1 degree increase. This prompted one civil society participant to remark that the “Bali roadmap is a roadmap to anywhere.”

A few days after the new agreement was forged, many are now having doubts whether on balance, it was positive. Would it have been better to have simply let the US walk out, allowing the rest of the world to forge a strong agreement containing deep mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the part of the developed countries? With a new US president with a new policy on climate change at the beginning of 2009, the US would have rejoined a process that would already be moving along with strong binding targets. As it is now, having been part of the Bali consensus, Bush administration negotiators, say skeptics, will be able to continue their obstructionist tactics to further water down global action throughout the negotiations in 2008.

One wonders what would have happened had Washington remained true to its ideological propensities and decided to stomp out of the room when the delegate from Papua New Guinea, releasing the conference’s pent up collective frustration, issued his now historic challenge: “We ask for your leadership and we seek your leadership. If you are not willing to lead, please get out of the way.” As everyone now knows, after last-minute consultations with Washington, the American negotiator backed down from the US’s hard-line position on an Indian amendment seeking the conference’s understanding for the different capacities of developing countries to deal with climate change and said Washington “will go forward and join the consensus.”

Weak Institutional Outcomes

The single-minded focus on getting Washington on board resulted in the dearth of hard obligations agreed upon at the meeting except for the deadline for the negotiating body, the “Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention,” to have its work ready for adoption at the Conference of Parties in Copenhagen in 2009 (COP 15).

Many delegates also felt ambivalent about the institutional arrangements that were agreed upon after nearly two weeks of hard North-South negotiations.

o An Adaptation Fund was set up, but it was put under the administration of the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) of the US-dominated World Bank. Moreover, the seed funds from the developed countries are expected to come to only between $18.6 million to US$37.2 million--sums which are deemed severely inadequate to support the emergency efforts to address the ongoing ravages of climate change in the small island states and others on the “frontlines” of climate change. Oxfam estimates that a minimum of US$50 billion a year will be needed to assist all developing countries adapt to climate change.

o A “strategic program” for technology development and transfer was also approved, again with troubling compromises. The developing countries had initially held out for the mechanism to be a designated a “facility” but finally had to agree to the watered-down characterization of the initiative as a “program” on account of US intransigence. Moreover, the program was also placed under the GEF with no firm levels of funding stated for an enterprise that is expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

o The REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) initiative pushed by host Indonesia and several other developing countries with large forests that are being cut down rapidly was adopted. The idea is to get the developed world to channel money to these countries, via aid or market mechanisms, to maintain these forests as carbon sinks. However, many climate activists fear that indigenous communities will simply be victimized by predatory private interests that will position themselves to become the main recipients of the funds raised.

Big Business Roars in

In this connection, Bali will be remembered as the climate change conference where business came in in a big way. A significant number of the side events focused on market solutions to the greenhouse gas (GHG) problem such as emissions trading arrangements. Under such schemes, GHG intensive countries can “offset” their emissions by paying non-GHG intensive countries to forego pollution-intensive activities, with the market serving as the mediator. Shell and other big-time polluters have been making the rounds touting the market as the prime solution to the climate crisis, a position that articulates well with the US position against mandatory emission cuts set by government.

Climate change activists have been appalled and stunned by the business takeover of the climate change discourse. According to them, the carbon market was originally a very minor part of the architecture of climate architecture, one that climate activists agreed to in order to get the US on board the Kyoto express. Well, the US did not get on board, and we are now stuck with carbon markets driving the process since the corporations have found that there is money to be made from climate change. Many climate activists worry that carbon trading will merely allow polluters in the North to keep on polluting while allowing private interests in the South to displace smallholders so they can set up unmonitored and unregulated tree plantations that are supposed to absorb carbon dioxide.

The Philippines at the Frontlines of Global Warming

The Philippines, we learned at Bali, is on the frontlines of climate change. In a study released at the meeting, the institute Germanwatch claimed that the Philippines was the country most negatively affected by climate-related disasters in 2006. Measured on a “climate risk index” derived from four indicators—total number of deaths, deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, absolute losses in millions of US$ purchasing power parity, and losses per unit of GDP—the Philippines topped North Korea, Indonesia, and Vietnam. When we talk about the people dying from the recent spate of supertyphoons like Millenio, let us be clear that we are talking about victims of climate change. When we talk about people being displaced or uprooted from their homes, we are talking about environmental refugees, as much refugees as people in Tuvalu and Bougainville who are forced to flee their lands on account of sea-level rise. We are no longer talking about the usual ravages of a normal typhoon season. We as a people are at the frontlines of global warming.

A National Response to Climate Change

The many dimensions of the climate crisis in the Philippines still need to be understood. We are sure, however, that many of the preemptive and adaptive measures needed to protect our people will cost billions of dollars. If what we saw in Bali is any indication, money on this scale is not likely to come from the North in the form of aid. We have to raise it from our own resources. Climate change is one more reason why we need to radically reduce the massive outflow of financial resources to our creditors and channeling it to solutions to national problems. More than ever, we must act to drastically write down the foreign debt.

Radically scaling down our debt is, however, but one aspect of a broader response. Let me conclude by saying that climate change is fast emerging as the greatest challenge to our generation, for even as we prepare for it, we must also make sure that our country develops so we can eliminate poverty. Poverty can never be a solution to the climate crisis. The ultimate solution is a pattern of development that is both sustainable and equitable. A transition to a low-growth, low-carbon economy where people’s standards of living have also risen is possible. But it will only be possible if equity is at the center of development. Thus climate change is both a crisis and an opportunity—an opportunity to overcome the structural obstacles to social equality and genuine democracy.


*Walden Bello is President of Freedom from Debt Coalition. He is also a Professor of Sociology at the University of the Philippines and senior analyst at the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He attended the Bali Conference on Climate Change as a civil society participant.

*Freedom from Debt Coalition
11 Matimpiin St., Brgy. Pinyahan, Quezon City, Philipines
Tel. No.: (+632) 9211985 | Telefax: (+632) 9246399
Email: fdc_media@yahoo. com
Website: www.freedomfromdebt coalition. org
Contact person: Bobby Diciembre, FDC media bureau, (+63) 920-9059856

December 18, 2007 | 7:40 AM Comments  0 comments



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