While defending the country’s sovereign territory remains a priority, Malacañang has emphasized that the Duterte administration is now more focused on increasing trade to cut poverty incidence, especially in rural underdeveloped areas.
President Duterte said in his speech on Monday in the 10th Biennial Convention and 20th Founding Anniversary Celebration of the Chinese-Filipino Business Club Inc.: “And if you look at it very closely, it would appear that there’s really a divide, the great divide now of ideological…. But we are all in the capitalist state. So the war now is on trade, not territory. That’s why I said geopolitics is always changing.”
Asked to clarify on the President’s statement, Presidential Spokesman Harry L. Roque Jr. said in a briefing at the Palace that territorial issues are still important, but stated that “we need to improve the economic life of our people rather than waging war over territories.”
“We are—the whole nation—not just the Philippines, concerned about uplifting the economic well- being of its people through trade and investments,” he said.
Prof. Rene Ofreneo, former labor undersecretary and dean of University of the Philippine-School of Labor and Industrial Relations, agreed that war now is on trade, which, he said, also requires a very coherent development framework to preserve and advance national interest not at the expense of other areas of the economy and society.
“On one point, he is right in saying that trade is war [which also] requires cooperation and more important to us, it requires a very coherent development framework, on one hand to preserve our national interest, but on the other hand, to advance our national interest, and we should not [do it] at the expense of other areas of our economy and our society like…our right to our own boundaries,” Ofreneo said.
Asked on whether the Duterte administration’s independent foreign policy is hindering the country from maximizing trade deals to earn more from exports, Ofreneo said the administration is trying to balance this by trying to reach out to China, but it should not be at the expense of existing trade relations with other countries.
Like in any war, Ofreneo added, the country needs to strengthen its domestic market to be able to win the war in globalization.
He described globalization as another form of war and that the country should craft a strategy in taking advantage of globalization. He cited countries like Japan, Korea, Singapore and China that have a “continuous capacity building” on where they think they could win the war.
“But moreover, it is also an opportunity for us to strengthen our local markets,” Ofreneo said.
He even cited, for instance, the local agriculture industry, which was predicted to boom in 1994, but continued to shrink until now.
“We joined World Trade Organization [back then] to liberalize and deregulate, but we don’t have have a program on how to wage the war,” he said.
For Ma. Ella Oplas, economics professor of De La Salle University, trade is important in the age of globalization.
“When you say the war is on trade and not territory, it means the war is about making one’s economy competitive to trade. Globalization is beyond territory. It is beyond borders. That’s why it’s trade liberalization,” Oplas said in a text message to the BusinessMirror.