Research group IBON said that the spirit of the Duterte administration’s rejection of official development aid (ODA) from the European Union (EU) for being used to intervene in the Philippines’ internal affairs is welcome. There is however a much clearer and stronger basis to reject ‘aid’ from the United States (US), which has used its aid programs to become the most interventionist foreign power in the country, said the group.
The Duterte government reportedly informed the EU that it will cease accepting aid from the bloc for future projects. There is still no formal explanation but it can be recalled that Pres. Rodrigo Duterte said in October 2016 that he is willing to forego financial aid from countries critical of his anti-drug campaign. He has also repeatedly said that he views foreign criticism as intervention in the country’s internal affairs.
IBON noted that EU aid accounts for a very small share of total ODA to the country. The US$227 million from the EU in 2015 was just 1.5% of total ODA for the year. Even if aid from multilateral agencies is not counted, EU aid to the Philippines is still less than 3% of total bilateral aid from individual donor countries. Japan leads with a 65% share of total bilateral aid followed by the US at 15%, Australia at 7%, and Korea at 6 percent.
The US meanwhile, according to IBON, is the most interventionist foreign power in the country and aggressively interferes in the country’s economic and political affairs far beyond what the aid figures might indicate. Former United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Andrew Natsios has candidly said that ‘development aid’ is “the most important tool of American influence in the developing world”.
IBON added that the US is the single-biggest foreign influence on Philippine economic policy-making. Taking just the period since 2011, the US government had been using the US$739 million Partnership for Growth (PFG) initiative to bring the Philippines into its flagship Asia-Pacific economic integration scheme – the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. Though the new US Trump administration has junked the TPP, the PFG will certainly still be used to push pro-US economic policies, said the group.
There is also the US$1 million USAID-funded The Arangkada Philippines project (TAPP) administered by the American Chamber of Commerce from 2010 to 2016. This lobbied policymakers on 471 policy recommendations of which some 80% have been started or already completed, noted IBON. In addition to this, there are four other USAID economic policy intervention projects cumulatively worth some US$50 million (Php2.4 billion): Trade-Related Assistance for Development (TRADE), Facilitating Public Investment (FPI), Investment Enabling Environment (INVEST), and Advancing Philippine Competitiveness (COMPETE) Project. These are multi-year projects but it is still striking that their combined budgets rival the personnel expenses of the government’s entire economic planning agency National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), IBON observed.
According to IBON, the US wants policies that benefit American corporate export and commercial interests as well as create the kind of free market-driven trade and investment system in the Asia-Pacific that allows it to maintain its hegemony and dominant economic position. US intervention in Philippine economic policy-making has always been to serve its own economic interests and not to develop the country, IBON said.
Yet international development cooperation should be about development and improving the lives of people, said the group. Rejecting US ‘aid’ will send the strongest possible signal that the Duterte administration indeed upholds independent foreign policy including in the vital economic realm, IBON concluded. ###
