"I hope saving it will become a legislative priority."
"I hope saving it will become a legislative priority."
While congressmen and Senator Panfilo Lacson were trading barbs about supposedly mind-boggling sums of pork barrel allocations, and while the Philippine hog industry is experiencing a crisis due to the infestation of the dreaded African Swine Fever (hogs, swine, pigs and pork barrel, ad nauseam), a representative from the third district of Pangasinan quietly refiled a bill to save Manila Bay from a gaggle of reclamation projects.
Rose Marie Baby J. Arenas is on the warpath against the Philippine Reclamation Authority and LGU officials of Manila, Pasay, Parañaque, Las Piñas and Bacoor for having entered into agreements to reclaim a total of 1,440 hectares along Manila Bay.
She further states in the explanatory note of HB 3169 that the PRA, formerly called the Public Estates Authority has a “National Reclamation Plan” which aims to reclaim a total of 38,000 hectares all over the country. Of this nationwide total, the PRA plan calls for the reclamation of some 26,234 hectares of water along the coast of Manila Bay!
That’s one-third of Metro Manila’s current size of 63,843 hectares. Put simply, PRA wants to increase the size of the present national capital region by landfilling on such a huge area of the bay.
This may be their funny way of decongesting the capital at the expense of what Congressman Arenas wants declared as a national heritage site, and rightly so.
The Supreme Court in its 2008 writ of kalikasan required the national government and local government units to “clean up, rehabilitate, and preserve Manila Bay, and restore its waters to make them fit for swimming and other forms of contact recreation.”
What reclamation will do is to obliterate the bay as its way of cleaning up the detritus of two generations of neglect. You want a clean Manila Bay?
Fill it up with soil and gravel, and upon the reclaimed land, build more buildings, albeit “green” as far as their sales brochures would claim. Cleaning and rehabilitating is such a gargantuan task, they might as well create land in the water, and profit immensely as they sell land to developers who would then build condominiums for the uber-wealthy.
With land values in the metropolis having zoomed up to half a million peso levels per square meter, it is cheaper to reclaim the water and create islands for the rich, particularly foreigners, mostly the insanely rich Asians who want havens for their mega-dollars.
From a business standpoint, the developers will rake in so much profit, but at the expense of generations of Filipinos who will be deprived of the bay, its fabled sunset, and destroy an entire ecosystem.
Despite pronouncements of President Duterte and despite the intent of the Supreme Court in rehabilitating Manila Bay, developers and their cohorts in city governments as well as national government agencies persist in their grandiose reclamation schemes.
Thus, Congress needs to pass a law that would specifically ban in no uncertain terms, and make it a criminal violation, to allow further reclamation in Manila Bay, Arenas states in the prefatory note to HB 3169.
Apart from the protection of our marine ecosystem which affects food security, the dangers of liquefaction in the reclaimed areas given that the country is on the earthquake belt, my beef against reclamation is that it would actually congest the original inner cities of the capital region further with migration from the countryside.
In a previous article on this paper, I asked what happens to the thousands of workers who would be “imported” from all over the country, to comprise the brawn of construction work in the reclamation projects.
Having earned more in construction jobs, albeit temporary, than what they could possibly eke out of tilling the soil in their provinces, would these workers go back, or stay in the metropolis? Surely they cannot afford to buy a few square meters of the land they helped reclaim, which is reserved for the mega-rich?
So they will repopulate the urban warrens of poverty in Manila, Pasay, Malabon, Navotas, Caloocan, Parañaque and beyond, renting hovels as they seek menial jobs in the urban jungle.
And yet, the present congestion in Metro Manila which has created monstrous traffic problems, urban squalor, and all sorts of social and economic problems for the country should mean de-populating the capital area by movement to the countryside. And we should start by moving the national government offices elsewhere, be it in Clark or the valleys west of the Sierra Madre, in the province of Rizal.
Certainly not by reclaiming more land and gouging out the waters of Manila Bay.
President after president has urged Congress to create a National Land Use Policy, defining how best to optimize the use of land as a God-given resource, for the benefit of the majority, for ensuring food security, and for proper zoning. Till now, from the time of Cory Aquino, proposed legislation toward land use has gathered dust in the archives of Congress.
Hopefully, saving Manila Bay, which has contributed to the historical, political, economic and cultural development of the country, and which has become a symbol of its God-given beauty, will become a legislative priority, for the sake of generations of Filipinos yet to come.