Meanwhile, the people are burdened with steep and frequent oil price hikes as a result of automatic price adjustments under the ODL, with the average retail price of all petroleum products jumping by 576 percent since the policy was first implemented in 1996.

ODL and free market apologists would dismiss the call for state regulation as empty propaganda but I urge genuinely concerned policy makers, academics, and experts to read House Bills 3029, 3030, and 3031 that are currently pending at the House of Representatives. These legislative proposals, jointly filed by party-list groups Anakpawis (Toiling Masses), Bayan Muna (People First), and Gabriela Women’s Party (GWP), outline concrete and detailed provisions on how we can implement the regulation of the downstream oil industry.

The second major point I want to make pertains to the agenda of the Energy Summit to pursue renewable energy over the medium and long term. Let me state first that the development of alternative, clean, and indigenous sources of energy must be pursued. If we seriously intend to achieve genuine and sustainable national industrialization, it is indispensable that we attain energy independence and security.

But my problem with the Arroyo regime’s energy program is that it relies too much on foreign capital, technology, and markets. Thus, in the process, it has reduced energy independence and security into a program of attracting foreign investments and plunder, instead of developing and utilizing indigenous energy resources for industrialization. The government has been doing this since the 1990s and with dire consequences on the economy and the people.

Look the at the country’s power sector reforms that began under President Fidel Ramos where the government aggressively pursued the privatization of the country’s power generation resources. The program resulted in onerous power supply contracts, bled government coffers dry, and unjustly bloated the consumers’ electricity bills. Mrs. Arroyo has continued to pursue this path under the Electirc Power Industry Reform Act (EPIRA) since 2001.

Another case is the Malampaya natural gas project, which is controlled by Shell and Chevron. Malampaya also contains crude oil reserves but its development has been greatly delayed because the foreign operators refused to develop it since they are already making billions of pesos in profits from extracting natural gas. In 2001, Shell and Chevron pumped crude oil from Malampaya as part of an extended well test but exported it to South Korea .

The Biofuels Act of 2006, meanwhile, is feared not only to cause environmental problems and undermine food security but also threatens to further concentrate vast tracts of agricultural lands in the hands of foreign agribusiness corporations and local comprador-landlords at the expense of genuine agrarian reform. Renewable energy development, as promoted in the Energy Summit and with funding support from the Asian Development Bank (ADB), World Bank, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), will be pursued within the same flawed framework. This leaves little or no hope that the country’s energy resources, including renewables, will be used to serve the people and genuine national industrialization. Business World / Posted by (Bulatlat.com)

*Published in Business World
1-2 February 2008

 Save as PDF