It’s one thing to spend the last half-century picking and exporting low-hanging fruit to prop up some semblance of “economic growth”. It’s another to be picking up fallen fruit, brushing off the maggots and exporting that as well.
OFW remittances have begun to stall, falling from a 15% December to January 2008 growth clip down to a “measly” 0.1% rate in its counterpart December to January 2009 period. Add to that the plunge in export volumes being felt across the export-dependent economies of Asia and we will find how very little in the way of indigenous capital — i.e., the fundamental substance of domestic economies — the Philippine economy actually possesses.
Domestic capital ultimately saves the day when global trade dries up. How non-existent, exactly, is the Philippines’ indigenous capital? Look no further for an answer than the “doable stimulus plan” touted in today’s INQ7.net Op-Ed.
First it laments the Philippines’ 3.4 million tourist visits in 2007 (and that was in 2007!) — laughable compared to stats that are in the tens of millions in the case of Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore (as an added context, note how the native populations of these countries, taken together, are less than the Philippines’ alone).
Then it makes reference to how “[m]any countries today are visited by millions of tourists every year and earn billions of dollars in foreign exchange” citing the top countries visited by tourists in 2007 — France, Spain, the United States, and Italy each one visited by upwards of 40 million tourists in 2007.
And then it cites that year’s 2nd-most-visited country, Spain — “an underdeveloped country until the 1960s”. Apparently it “developed its tourism industry and is now one of the top five most visited countries and the second biggest earner from tourism in the world”. As a matter of fact, the Inq7.net Editor adds: “Spain is not resting on its laurels and is continuing to develop business models that are environmentally, socially and culturally sustainable”!
Indeed, it therefore makes it interesting that we now conjecture that maybe, if underdeveloped-until-the-1960′s Spain can do it, guess what: maybe the Philippines can do the same! :D
Okay, so what exactly does “the Philippines” have to showcase to the international tourist?
According the the Inq7.net Editor, that’s a no-brainer:
The Philippines has many tourist attractions like Boracay, one of the best beaches in the world; Palawan, “the last frontier,” which has exotic wildlife, white sand beaches and natural wonders like an underground river; Bohol, which has the world-famous Chocolate Hills and superb diving spots like Panglao and Balicasag; the Banaue rice terraces, called the Eighth Wonder of the Modern World; and Tubbataha Reefs, an excellent diving spot.
In the local venacular: mga walang-kamatayang turis atraksyon ng Pilipinas (roughly — not literally — translated: Lola Basyang’s list of default Philippine tourist “attractions”). As expected, no list is of course complete without the Banaue Rice Terraces — the only man-made tourist attraction in the list; nevertheless (and no less than) the “Eighth Wonder of the Modern World”. Hmmmm… there seems to be some sort of Pinoy-style confusion around the definition of the word modern here…
Notice how our land’s natural wonders utterly dominate this list of “incentives” to visit our fair land. The nature and character of our society, our culture, our history, or our heritage plays virtually no part in our value proposition to the the world’s tourists. That kind of makes us an apples-to-orange comparison to the Top Five tourist destinations that the Inq7.net Editor cited. Certainly the prospect of a trip to France does not primarily evoke visions of one posing with the natural wonders of the French countryside in the background.
We may as well put the following words in our tourist brochures:
Nice Pacific islands to visit. Just avoid all evidence of Filipino habitation.
That’s a fair call in my book, considering that Filipinos have for the last several decades systematically destroyed the very natural wonders it now desperately hawks to anyone out there with foreign exchange to spare for leisure.
Indeed, evidence of Filipino habitation is next-to-impossible to ignore in these named-after-a-Spanish-king islands. No less than 3.4 million hectares of forest cover has disappeared from 1990 to 2005. Primary forest cover now accounts for just 2.8% of total land area in these islands. Add to that the human excrement we regularly dump into our rivers and stormwater drains. Years ago, I took a helicopter flight over Manila and the thing I remember the most is looking down upon the port area of Manila Bay and seeing a huge blot of black water at the mouth of the Pasig River contrasting sharply with the green-bluish water further out to sea.
That’s “just” our forests and our water supply. But it reflects our society’s regard and respect for the land we inhabit and now rely on desperately for our future survival as part of the global economy in the face of this “crisis”. It makes the pitch of the “natural wonders” of our land that dominates our tourist brochures sound rather phoney and utterly out-of-sync with our collective character.
So much for a model that is “environmentally, socially and culturally sustainable” like the way Spain is going about it.
Trouble with us is that we are great copy cats when it comes to the veneer of what we aim to copy. We take the veneer and stuff it with cheap laminate.
Sounds like our approach to practicing “democracy”, doesn’t it? :D
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Benny, sometimes you manage to hit one out of the ballpark.
actually i don’t understand this criticism at all….
you say all we have to offer is nature… but in the same breath you say our nature sucks…
ano ba tlga?
and then you say that all we have to offer is natural wonders not man-made wonders.
what the point?
“Nice Pacific islands to visit. Just avoid all evidence of Filipino habitation.”
consider our neighbors thailand, malaysia, and indonesia. they too stress the beauty of their natural heritage… this is natural and obvious…
why? coz people who visit come from cold climate countries and want to experience the tropical weather.
why travel across the world to hangout in the city? when they can do that where they live?
i don’t get it…
Who would want to come here? Manila overtook Mumbai in the most densest capital in the world, mentally and physically.
There is nothing to see in the Philippines. I, myself, is not safe in the Philippines. Even in historic Basilica del Santo Nino it’s posted in every station of the cross “Beware of Pickpocketers, GOD IS BUSY” REALLY! REALLY! REALLY! iF ONLY i CAN POST THE PICTURE!
You can look at the bottle. Half full or half
empty. Dont be too sad. We have no monopoly of
the Economic Misery. What goes down, will certainly
go up again…Hope for the best that things will
recover.
Wha planet you came from, c.d.e? In my nick of the woods called Pilifinas, what goes down goes down forever and never come back up.
Half full or half empty are all the same. Even Human resources people don’t ask that crappy psychobabble because everyone knows the answer from peanut vendor to corrupt CEOs.
When I applied for dear lamentable Intel before they folded, they had lie detector test prongs and wires and all the works on me!!!!
I asked why all these? The white guy said “We don’t trust Pilifinos” DO YOU WANT TO BE INTERVIEWED FOR THE JOB OR NOT?
i took the lie detector test while being interviewed.
It’s like Nicole! Recunt for Visa to America or prosecute with Gabriella!
Honestly benign0, this time I don’t know what the f_ing hell you’re talking about.
Seriously dude, for someone who hasn’t even gotten around the frigging country (I’m sure you have a preconceived notion that it’s ugly, anyway) you have the gall to criticize what you haven’t even seen yet. The Philippines is historically rich with all sorts of manmade structures and objects both intact and in ruin.
What do you really want? Man made attractions? You’ve probably only seen Binondo, Quiapo, and Escolta from the inside of a polluted jeepney without ever walking there, on foot, finding out what the hell of a big deal that place really has. I’m betting you haven’t been to Corregidor to find out how to turn an island into a gunnery fortress. Hell, have you even been to Intramuros?
Ilocos Norte is the winner in this aspect — 30+ Spanish era churches, indigenous Ivatan habitats in Batanes, beautiful lighthouses, Vigan’s old houses, and the first windfarm in the country in the beaches of Bangui.
Sure sure, these things were not made by Filipinos, they were made by the Americans and the Spanish, I’m sure you’ll profess. You’ll probably dismiss the CCP complex, San Juanico bridge, the Mall of Asia complex, the Marcelo Fernan Bridge, and anything and everything else as “chicken” compared to what your vaunted foreigners have done.
But seriously, so what? Do we really need our own Eiffel Tower or Akashi Kaiko or Space Needle or Statue of fraking Liberty? All of these projects are dictated by needs and budgets and questions on practicality — I would find it infuriating to find out if we will build a building as tall as Burj Dubai considering the state of our economy.
So I’ll ask again, your point is?
Renato Pacifico,
Where have you been to in the Philippines, aside from Manila anyway?
In benny’s defense, he does make a salient point. We flaunt these natural wonders but we dont take care of them. It used to be that when one wants to go a good beach from metro Manila, one just takes a bus. Now one has to take a plane.
Jon, I think Jeg very succinctly described the point I wanted to make.
And by the way, I used to travel all over the Philippines as part of my job. So I’m quite aware of its natural beauty and some of the architectural wonders built by our former colonial masters.
Too bad we collectively as a people fail to respect these.
@Jeg on March 18th, 2009 12:31 pm
where is the beach that people used to go to that is a bus ride from Metro Manila?
Batangas, Bataan… Cavite, even. Now anyone wanting to ‘beach’ in the Manila Bay side of Cavite probably has a death wish.
benign0,
Then say that, concisely, instead of peppered your prose with your signature rhetoric which blurs every point that you make.
As a person who’s become newly involved in the travel agency and have traveled across the country more recently, what I could at least tell you is that:
- Locals whether blue collar workers, farmers, or fisherfolk are being made aware of the huge economic benefit of eco-tourism in their locale, many of them taking 2nd jobs as tour guides and drivers or other support jobs for tourism
- Environmental protection is slowly becoming a self-policing activity, e.g., fisherfolk will now pursue, among their peers, those who do dynamite fishing — because coral destruction means less dive sites means less revenue for them
- There are municipalities where the government *is* doing its job, e.g., Puerto Princesa, where even the local tambay would scold you for flicking a cigarette butt into the street.
- Guides, even the “poorest” and “least educated” ones are now seriously conscious about garbage and sanitation; the bangkeros will be the one who are in the lookout for trash and garbage left in any uninhabited islands, for instance, and will constantly remind us to bring any trash we have back aboard the boat
- Many Filipinos are aware and wary of the Boracay phenomenon, e.g., overdevelopment of a tourist attraction, especially since they feel bad about having to compete with too many migrants (most of the vendors in Boracay, for example, are not native Aklanon) as well as having to deal with sanitation and water supply issues.
Granted that these may be small steps taken, I’m quite glad they are done at all.
What concerns me about the local tourism industry is that it is still reactionary: many times foreigners will be the first ones to notice something unusual or beautiful about a certain area, and only then will the locals there build an industry around the attraction, even if they knew that it was there all along.
What I would want is an active effort among businessmen and locals to look for potential new attractions in their own areas, learn how to market those via the internet, and otherwise think of tourism-generating activities without stopping at the “festival-making” strategy some places are stuck at.
Jeg,
San Juan and Laiya, Batangas — a bit more remote than Nasugbu, Anawangin in Zambales, and hell even Subic has some nice beaches, all within 3 hours of Manila.
In the old days people went to the beach in Paranaque, in the area where the Coastal Road is now. I concede that I wish that this was still a safe alternative; having beaches right at the urbanity the way some parts of Floriday and Hawaii are would have been nice.
Fortunately, plane rides today are nearly as cheap as a bus ride is.
That by itself is another environmental issue. With flight fares plunging over the last several decades, more people are jetting around the world thinking they are entitled to see the world on the cheap.
Can the environment sustainably support cheap air travel? Just because air travel is cheap does not mean it should be used in the volumes that we partake of it today in the same way that just because water is cheap does not mean we should use it to sprinkle our lawns for 4 hours every day.
@benign0 on March 19th, 2009 8:50 am
don’t believe in the price mechanism here?
i agree with jon. if that was the point, then this whole bashing of RP’s natural wonders is weird at best…
theres dirty places and there’s clean places. no shock there…
benign0,
So what do you propose? We are an archipelago. Air travel will be the most convenient and practical — traveling by boat will be as environmentally unsound (the mileage of ships are measured in liters per nautical mile, not the other way around) and a combination of road and water will be just as arduous and inconvenient.
Rail will be a fantastic possibility — but I fear it will merely be a dream. To be able to connect the whole country we must do what the French and English did across the English channel — at least seven times over.
It’s much much easier to call out on problems than think of solutions, especially when they don’t affect your life directly anyway.
Maybe there IS no solution Jon. Or maybe I quite simply don’t have one. Just because I highlight problems does not necessarily mean I know the solution. Or, worse for that matter, not all problems necessarily have solutions.
The simple fact is that we are an archipelago and that maybe the domestic economy should NOT be dependent excessively on transport of people and goods between the islands.
benign0,
Then what you have done is nothing but paint us to this little corner where damned if we do, damned if we don’t. A corner where the simple conclusion is that Filipinos are losers who are incapable of solving problems, and at the same time pointing out that solving certain problems will merely exacerbate other ones.
It’s not simple, really, this time, isn’t it?
I’ll tell you what, Benny. My wife and I have invested way too much into this industry already, so I’ll just go ahead with it, see how it goes. Maybe in 10, 20 years, we can talk about it again. ;)
Unless we clean out our garbages. Tourist will not visit us. Why
would you go to an unsanitary environment?
Tasio,
True enough. That’s why tourists don’t go to Manila. The Philippines is beyond Manila, however.
I’m in the industry, and having seen (and worked) in many places around the world, the Philippines is WORLD class. But if one is looking for a Las Vegas or a Disney or a Dubai, then take the next plane to Las Vegas or Disney or Dubai. The problem is that many of the movers and shakers in the industry tend to think of what they see outside not what they have inside.
Wow, what a beautifully written piece; superb stuff here. Thanks! Michael.