Philippines cannot afford romantic anti-development politics

“Pax” means peace, and “silica” is a mineral which forms the foundation of computer chips. The Philippines became the 13th member to sign the US-led Pax Silica initiative, resulting in the planned establishment of a 4,000-acre (1,619-hectare) industrial “hub” within the Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC), in Pampanga.

The goal: To build a secure, trusted, and “positive-sum” network of allied supply chains for tech, reducing reliance on “coercive” or “rival” nations. It primarily targets as a counterpoint to Chinese dominance in semiconductor and rare earth processing.

Focus areas include the “silicon stack,” ranging from raw critical minerals (nickel, copper, cobalt) to refined materials, advanced chip manufacturing, AI data centers, and 5G/6G communicaiton. As of April 2026, members include the US, Australia, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Korea, Sweden, UAE, and the UK.

The Philippines still has substantial arable land that is underutilised or stuck in low-yield agriculture. Reformers often focus only on blocking new investment rather than improving productivity, irrigation, roads, storage, and credit.

Example: Drive 2 hours south of Manila, where you will be greeted by more coconut trees than inhabitants.

Powerful landlords, many of them lawmakers, have long skirted land reform through land-use conversion, corporate restructuring, subdivision schemes, and legal delay, leaving many rural communities trapped in unequal land ownership structures.

Still, the country has huge arable land left uncultivated. Example: Drive 12 hours south of Manila; millions more coconut trees will greet you, no humans for miles.

A supply-chain hub for semiconductors, critical minerals, and advanced manufacturing can support civilian industry, exports, and higher wages. The Philippines cannot build prosperity by rejecting every sector linked to security-sensitive supply chains.

The cornerstone of the Left’s ideology is envy.

Envy those who prosper. Those who do better. Tax the rich, the perceived rich, everyone. Burn the assets of those who don’t pay revolutionary taxes. These are toxic ideas and practices.

They’re a guarnatee development will fail. Socialist ideas, developed before AI and apps, have gained currency for a good part of the 20th century.

And led to millions of deaths. Thankfully, it’s mostly behind us now.

Still, much of the hard Left in the Philippines talks as if the only alternatives are dependency, nationalisation, or an “anti-imperialist”, “Death to America” kind of development model.

This is not only impossible, or impractical. It is a retreat, a model from hell.

Repeatedly wishing for or chanting the death of a nation deemed as the “enemy” does not guarantee the flourishing of one’s motherland.

Death, or “from-each-according-to-capacity/to-each-according-to-need” Marxist ideal is archaic at best, mildly relevant before apps and algorithmic software came; and devilish at worst — an illogical, impractical, incoherent development strategy.

For a middle-income archipelago like the Philippines, with ambitions of hittle upper-middle income nation status soon, competing in a multipolar economy, one should carefully plan, work hard, and recalibrate based on ground realities, not slogans.

Philippine mining has repeatedly been shaped by weak enforcement, capital shortages, and commodity dependence, while Chinese demand and trading networks have influenced nickel flows from areas such as Tawi-Tawi and Palawan. Pretending this influence does not exist only weakens Filipino leverage.

Example: The Philippines overtook Indonesia as the biggest nickel ore producer: both Asean countries are the top two suppliers to biggest buyer, China. In the Philippine Tawi-Tawi accounted for 27% of overall nickel ore exports to China.

Fact: China relies heavily on the Philippines for supply of the material for stainless steel and EV batteries. Another fact: The Philippines has no nickel processing capacity, vs Indonesia which mandated a ban on nickel ore, in order to force domestic a nickel processing ecosystem.

While Indonesia has succeeding, leading to its “nickel boom”, the Philippines has been reduced to becoming a raw material exporter. Unless investments in nickel processing are encouraged and protected from sloganeering, it will be more of the same.

The Philippines is resource-rich nation. It is dubbed as a pauper “sitting on a pot of gold”.

A trip to Aroroy, Paracale or Rapu-Rapu (all in the zero-free zone Bicol region, with a high incidence of malnutrition: 67.9% of households in the region are “food insecure”, as per official 2025 data) reveals a deep contrast of premium resources but high poverty rates.

In the Philippine setting, environemtn protection concerns are real: land grabs can displace farmers and Indigenous communities, pollution can damage watersheds and fisheries, and weak enforcement can turn “development” into a license for abuse.

But the answer is not to reject every strategic investment outright; it is to build stronger rules that make investment serve the public interest.

That means tighter permitting, transparent consultations, clearer zoning and land-use planning, and real benefit-sharing with affected communities. It also means stricter environmental safeguards, credible monitoring, and penalties that are actually enforced when companies or officials cut corners.

Blanket hostility can sound principled. In reality, this often leaves the same communities stuck with low incomes, underinvestment, and no path to value-added industry.

The better test: a whole-of-nation quizz, to see whether or not a project protects land rights, raises local employment, adds domestic processing, and strengthens national capacity rather than merely extracting wealth.

In short: the goal should be disciplined development, not development by default — not paralysis by protest, or more of the same.

Calling every pro-industrialisation effort “sellout”, “elitist” or “reactionary” — or tagging every critic as “Red” — are not only counter-productive.

They avoid the real issues: how to protect farms, how to raise rural incomes, how to ensure mineral value-addition stays in-country, and how to keep all parties, foreign or local accountable.

It’s an outcome of lazy thinking, a bias for criticism instead of action. They avoid hard work.

This is the hardest challenge. When power and authorities are concentrated in Manila, without any basic whistleblower protection, running the country’s “industries” are left to local dynasties, crooks, goons and critics.

The better answer is not to choose between peasant land rights and strategic development.

It is to insist on both: stronger land tenure protection, investments in good agricultural practices, tougher anti-conversion enforcement, transparent mining regulation, and a real industrial policy that turns God-given resources into domestic capability, not another country’s lever.

If the Philippines wants food security, it needs productive agriculture. If it wants sovereignty, it needs industry. If it wants to escape dependency, it must stop confusing anti-investment rhetoric with national development.