01/27/2012
Other than the letters to its
name, the Philippines has other things that are more plentiful than
Ecuador: Nine times more population; 10 percent more land area; a sea
territory that is far more vast, etc. Yet, Ecuador is much better off in
terms of per capita gross domestic product (GDP), with $8,327 compared
to our $4,111; or its higher Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.72
compared to our 0.64, among other statistics.
In addition, one key
difference will make the Filipino people see the light of day — that
is, if they would cease to be mindlessly dependent on mainstream media.
This sad comparison centers on a recent announcement on the Philippine
government’s share of Malampaya oil profits totaling $1.1 billion, which
translates to only 10 percent of the gas facility’s total earnings for
2011. Ecuador, in contrast, gets an astounding 87-percent share of gross
revenues today from oil extracted by foreign companies. So what
accounts for the Philippines’ sordid plight?
If only we had the
same tough pro-people, pro-nation leadership as Ecuador under its
progressive President Rafael Correa, the Philippines would also have a
just share of its natural and national patrimony. If RP had someone
like Correa today, the people would be enjoying not just a $1.1-billion
share from Malampaya but around $8.8 billion (equivalent to P360
billion), or about the entire sum of the yearly allocation for interest
payments on our foreign debt. If only we had this money in our hands,
then Congress could have had the means to budget the principal repayment
of our foreign debt in order to wipe this out in a few years’ time.
Ecuador
did not always have this vastly pro-people arrangement with the
transnational oil companies in its country. Before 2007, it only had a
13-percent share of revenues from its oil fields. All that changed with
the victory of a nationalist leadership. And this exciting and welcome
development for all Ecuadorians was chronicled in Jayat Ghosh’s “Could
Ecuador be the most radical and exciting place on Earth?” in The
Guardian.
As a backgrounder, the then 47-year-old Correa was
elected in 2007 on an anti-trapo platform after a year of then
Vice-President Alfredo Palacio’s transition government, which took over
from Lucio Gutiérrez, who was ousted by a “citizens’ movement”
protesting his administration’s failures to deliver on land reform,
lower unemployment, social services and historical exploitation by the
oligarchy.
By December 2008, Correa declared Ecuador’s national
debt illegitimate for having been contracted by previous corrupt and
despotic regimes. And as he pledged to fight creditors in international
courts, he succeeded in reducing the debt before even paying any of it
off.
Correa then brought his country into the fold of the
Venezuela-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas in June 2009. All
these policies were, of course, anathema to the US. Thus, a police-led
coup that led to the Ecuadorian leader’s kidnapping was launched — with
Correa thankfully restored after being rescued by the military. But this
by no means deterred him from renegotiating contracts with foreign oil
companies, thereby completely changing the rules by December 2010.
Foreign
oil firms, which used to pay just over a percentage of their profits to
the national government through taxes, were made service providers
instead and paid a set fee for each barrel of oil extracted (at about
$35 per barrel); the national government then kept everything above
that, which allowed it to profit whenever oil prices increased.
Over
and above his achievements in the oil sector, Correa also dramatically
raised the corporate tax share in the total pie from 35 to 40 percent.
These increases were then “put to good use in infrastructure investment
and social spending,” raising Ecuador’s proportion of public investment
to GDP to 10 percent — the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean —
while doubling social spending since 2006, enabling progress toward free
education and free health care for all.
Ghosh gushes, “All this
may sound too good to be true, and certainly the process of
transformation has only just begun. There are bound to be conflicts with
those whose profits and power are threatened, as well as other hurdles
along the way. But for those who believe that we are not condemned to
the gloomy status quo, and that societies can do things differently,
what is happening in Ecuador provides inspiration and even guidance. The
rest of the world has much to learn from this ongoing radical
experiment.”
Here in the Philippines, we have a scion of a cacique
family in power who epitomizes a class of people whom Correa fought and
overcame to launch the “radical and exciting” changes benefiting the
Ecuadorian nation today.
Filipinos need the same type of
leadership as the new Latin American leaders like Correa, Hugo Chavez
(Venezuela), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay), Dilma Rousseff (Brazil), or
Cristina Fernández (Argentina), who continue to push their countries
forward with nationalist and pro-people policies.
While Ecuador
wrested the just and rightful bounties of its oil wealth from foreign
hands and gave them to its people, RP’s past and present governments
have merely been in cahoots with Royal Dutch Shell and Chevron, allowing
additional investments in Malampaya to dilute the country’s already
measly 10-percent share — when the fact is all these “investments” were
derived from Malampaya profits courtesy of Filipino power consumers, who
have been paying for overpriced electricity through natural gas plants
managed by a big oligarchic family.
Just the same, pressure from
the likes of Energy Secretary Rene Almendras and his ilk continues for
the privatization of the state-owned Philippine National Oil
Co.-Exploration Corp. (PNOC-EC), which represents government’s share in
Malampaya.
And so, as our country’s senators are caught up in impeachment rapture, the plunder of our nation continues unabated.
(Tune
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(Reprinted with permission from Mr. Herman Tiu-Laurel)
Source: The Daily Tribune
URL:
http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20120127com6.html