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At last, the No. 1 Economist of the Arroyo administration has begun
to sound less eager to please the outside world and come back to the
essential virtue of patriotism. President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo
did so in her speech last Friday at the general assembly and
induction of officers of the Federation of Philippine Industries (FPI).
The occasion was also the venue of the launching of the “Buy Pinoy-Buy
Local” campaign being waged by the FPI and the Federation of
Filipino-Chinese Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FFCCCI).
Said the President: “Other things being equal,
economists like me focus on market-based solutions except that many
times economists like me interpret the market-based solution to mean
that they don’t necessarily believe in buying local because they
don’t necessarily believe that buying local is always in the best
interest of the nation. The argument given in Orthodox Economics is
that other things being equal, there are instances when it will cost
a huge amount of money and create inefficiencies to merely buy
local.”
But, the President admitted what other
people—like the economic patriots of the Fair Trade Alliance and
the movers and shakers of the FPI and the FFCCCI—have been saying
for years in their effort to persuade the administration to temper
its decisions to embrace the global non-tariff regime and apply more
zeal in the war against smugglers: “Things are not equal when
there is smuggling.”
She did not say it but we hope she also now
realizes that things are not equal when the Philippines has
voluntarily removed tariffs on various products while the same
products are subject to 10 to 50 percent tariffs in our neighboring
countries.
Because of the ease with which treasonous
Filipinos, in partnership with overseas partners, are able to
smuggle in products to our country, we have become the dumping
ground of every conceivable manufactured good and agricultural
produce.
But Pinoy, buy local
President Arroyo, to stirring applause from her
FPA-FFCCCI audience, publicly instructed Secretary Eduardo Ermita
“to reissue our Executive Order regarding the Government’s
Preferential Procurement of Materials and Supplies Produced, Made
and Manufactured in the Philippines.”
When that EO is given teeth, executive
department offices and their subsidiary agencies including DepEd and
CHED supervised schools and colleges, local government units of all
levels, government-owned and controlled corporations, the various
uniformed services, will have to use and therefore buy only products
and materials made in the Philippines.
The sooner that happens the better for our
much-disadvantaged local manufacturing companies. The latest news is
that as of May 5 the Palace was finalizing the new version of the EO
or a strong circular requiring all government offices assiduously to
follow it.
Perhaps both to make these new moves clearer to
the public and to explain this openly protectionist campaign to her
total free-trade ideologue-friends abroad, President Arroyo made a
point of saying this in her speech: “The challenge here is to
reconcile the legitimate interests of our local businessmen, on the
one hand, with the obligation to make available the best goods and
services for our taxpayers at the lowest cost from a truly open and
competitive market. But given the track record of FPI in supporting
our initiatives for a better life for our people, there is enough
good faith and goodwill in FPI for us to master that challenge
together.”
Anti-smuggling equals anti-corruption
The President revealed that she appreciates the
FPI-FFCCCI’s “Buy Pinoy-Buy Local” campaign as a
“market-based solution” to the seemingly unsolvable problem of
smuggling.
“We share the challenge of fighting smuggling
. . . I have made tough and politically unpopular decisions to raise
revenues and crack down on smugglers so that we could invest in our
infrastructure and our people. There is no room in the development
of our country to tolerate smuggling and the corruption that goes
with it when so much remains to be done to invest in the nation,”
she told the businessmen and industrialists, whose objective in
launching their drive to raise the level of consumerist patriotism
is precisely to make the sale of smuggled goods unprofitable.
President Arroyo, however, raised the issue to a
moral imperative: “But the principle of ‘No buyers, No
sellers’—if there are no buyers, there will be no
sellers—applies not only to smuggled goods. It also applies to the
anti-corruption program. So, I ask the FPI to make sure that the
private sector does not seek ‘slight favors’ from your working
friends in the Customs. That should be one of the responsibilities
of FPI—[the obliteration] of that kind of culture in the business
community.”
She is absolutely right. The smugglers are, or
have partners who are, also businessmen and industrialists.
The patriotic and ethically upright businessmen
and industrialists must have the courage to expose—and even risk
life, limb and wealth and testify against—these destroyers of our
economy, these promoters of mass poverty in our land.
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