August 16 || Philippine Foreign Policy

"Another boring meeting". The session started with this statement from our very own professor. Ironically, this statement made the discussion more interesting for me. I was absent last meeting and fortunately, we had a recap of last week's discussion, the relations of the Philippines with U.S, China and Japan.

For this session, we talked about the major concern of the Philippine Foreign Policy. Alarmingly, we have several major concerns that I think the government must address effectively. First, on the regional arrangements and multilateral organizations. Our government, as expected must promote the national interest in the regional arrangements through development diplomacy. I have been hearing this kind of diplomacy in my other subjects but it is never clear what it means except that it is used to specific areas. In the case of the first concern, development diplomacy is used through trade, investment and technology transfer of course in cooperation with the different international organizations. I've read some articles about Trans-pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). This was mentioned by our professor. This is interesting for me as it is a trade agreement between countries from the different sides of the world.

As our discussion has pointed out, the Philippines' involvement in the the international organizations are sometimes questionable. For example, we support peacekeeping operations of the UN in war-torn areas considering that we have our own "situations" or internal issues. This point leads me to this question: What are our priorities?

I find it important as well that we do not forget the marginalized part of the society such as children and women because for me, who else is going to care for these sectors?

The next part of the discussion is about the territorial rights. I agree with our professor saying that this concern is actually answerable by our constitution. Whatever is written there is the basis of our claims. However, we must always consider that other countries would also have their constitution that could be way different from ours causing disputes among countries, damaging their relations.

Lastly, we tackled direct foreign investments. Again, development diplomacy was mentioned in this part of the discussion pointing out that Europe along with U.S, China, Japan and ASEAN (which includes the Philippines) and these countries could be sources of direct investment, technology transfer and trade. At this point, tourism is considered the main thrust of Philippine Foreign Policy. Honestly, I believe that only if our tourism is well taken care of, it would help our economy so much. After all, our country has a lot of tourist spots.

Our OWFs are important as much as all the above mentioned. As our nationals are scattered in the different parts of the world working and remitting money to our country helping our economy, the more that the government should be keen enough to protect them.

It is a great challenge for this administration to address all the major concerns mentioned above. But, as Filipino citizens of this country, we must not forget that we have our responsibilities too.