Editorial

SOME THOUSANDS OF kilometers away from the country, a milestone in Philippine science and technology (S&T) unfolded last October: DIWATA-2, the nation’s second microsatellite, was launched just past noon from the Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. The Filipino audience watched the historic affair via livestream in one of Diliman’s auditoriums. The crowd cheerily waved their Philippine flaglets as the cubic satellite was carried into space by the Japanese H-IIA F40 rocket.

It was a wonderful day for Philippine S&T; the likes of DIWATA-2 (and her elder sibling launched two years ago) just shows how much Filipino scientists and engineers are capable of. But even with our soaring DIWATA in space, a sad reality permeates in the country it left below.

In 2015, UNESCO published a report noting that the country’s number of researchers and the amount of national investment put into research and development (R&D) “remain low by any standards.”

Meanwhile, the Japanese Center for Research and Development Strategy concluded in a study that “it is still too early for [countries including the Philippines] to contribute to the world’s S&T front lines.”

Analogous to Prometheus, a Greek demigod who was punished for returning fire to mankind, our S&T, our scientists and engineers are restrained—bounded. But to unbind our science, we do not need a Hercules to save us like Prometheus did.

The task, to change the state of Philippine S&T, is Herculean however, requiring the execution of a nationalist socioeconomic agenda.

Kill the eagle

Advancing Philippine S&T is a complex task, but it can succinctly mean something as simple as this: to establish and maintain a nurturing environment for the S&T population.

Asked about how we can do this, we may think of increasing government funds for R&D, improving our science education and creating incentives for our scientists. And it may surprise you but in spite of Duterte, the government is actually doing just this in one way or another.

The public spending on R&D actually increased. We have the Magna Carta for Scientists and Engineers and the Balik Scientist Program has recently been enacted into law. The Free Tuition Law should also increase access to science programs, and government scholarships should attract more students to STEM fields. And the Education Department received the largest share of the annual budget for 2019.

Yet, the state of things is still as it is. Why? Well, the numbers are just not enough. For example, spending on R&D indeed increased but only by a mere .03 percentage points from 2007 to 2013. And while the Education Department was indeed allocated with the lion’s share of funds, the other truth is that it was given 29.1 percent less of its proposed budget.

Further, on average, only 0.23 percent of all college enrollees will become science or math graduates despite the benefits of scholarships. And the supposed incentives provided by the Magna Carta is yet to stop any scientist from “looking for greener pastures” abroad while the Balik Scientist Program tries to court Filipino scientists away from attractive research positions (and day-to-day life) in America, Europe and elsewhere.

All these policies and programs, while good-intentioned, just do not address the fundamental root of the boundedness of our S&T that is due to the nature of our economy. The state of our S&T is just one of the consequences of the orientation of the country’s economic and political climate more than anything else.

One of the biggest, if not the most fundamental, step that we can take to improve S&T is to therefore fix the prices-inflating, inequality-increasing economic disposition that we are in. A premier S&T just cannot possibly burgeon in a poverty-stricken backdrop.

In order to do this, we must first understand what’s wrong with our economy, that it is import-dependent and export-oriented.

We rely on imports for goods and technologies that meet our needs. By how much? Well, the Foreign Agricultural Service projected that the Philippines is set to import 1.2 million metric tons of rice this year. We are so import-dependent that we need to buy from other countries something that is at the core of our culture.

And while we import many ready-tobuy goods, we export our minerals, timber and crops. (We even de-facto export our people because they find better lives abroad.) All of the raw materials that we export could have gone for the use of Filipinos, but instead, these exports will return back to the Philippines as finished products sold by the foreign market.

This economic orientation is the hideous gift concocted by politicians and economists that subscribe to neoliberalism, a socioeconomic ideology that advocates for the reduction or elimination of state interference in trade, privatization of public assets and the liberalization of the market.

For a developing country, state policies guided by neoliberalism can only mean subservience to the foreign market and a retardation of its capacity to be on the same footing as the industrialized countries.

The fundamental step that the government should take is to therefore backtrack from the neoliberal highway, which only allows the foreign market to squeeze resources out of the Philippines and sell imported products that kill local industries. The state should launch a program for national industrialization. This involves the protection and development of local industries in order to promote a self-reliant economy (as opposed to an import-dependent, export-oriented one).

And this is what many of the developed countries we see now have done. In his landmark “Kicking Away the Ladder” piece published as a special report in Foreign Policy in Focus, economist Ha-Joon Chang showed that “virtually all of today’s developed countries actively used interventionist trade and industrial policies aimed at promoting, not simply ‘protecting,’ infant industries during their catch-up periods.”

He continues, saying that “the historical picture is clear … There is no denying that the [nationally developed countries] actively used [protectionist] policies.” In fact, “many of [these countries] actually protected their industries a lot more heavily than what the currently developing countries have done.” To wit, neoliberalism is historically the exact opposite of what developed countries have done during their catch-up periods.

Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for developing the economy of a country. How the Philippines will develop its economy will be different in some way to how other countries developed. But the historical pattern is there. The developed countries protected their industries.

If we have national industries and implement nationalist policies, then we will be able to facilitate technology transfer and technology independence. We will be able to reverse the import-dependent and export-oriented nature of our economy since we can finally process our own raw materials and we can produce the goods and technologies that we need.

To advance our S&T, we must reverse the orientation of our economy and that requires a nationalist program of industrialization. And this means the deliberate rejection of economic subservience to the dictates of the foreign market, of so-called trade partners. We must kill the “eagles” that live off our resources.

No Hercules needed

Scientists must organize and involve themselves politically. We should passionately assert our demands for industrialization and S&T investment.

One of the ways that this can be strongly manifested is by transforming present S&T associations as venues not only for scientific discussions but also as places where the scientific community can air its troubles and propose solutions.

For example, the annual Samahang Pisika ng Pilipinas conference can be more than just the eminent physics-research gathering in the country. It can also be a place where topics such as physics education and the Philippines’ technological dependence are major and regular agenda of the assembly. Scientists must be able to have this type of discussions with their colleagues and students and coordinate with other sectors in order to resolve national issues that affect not just S&T but the rest of society.

We cannot stop at just doing good research or even extremely good research because the stuntedness of our science is not dependent on the individual achievements of our scientists. Instead, it is hinged on a societal system.

That is why in the end, no star scientist, no Hercules, is necessary. Two, three Nobel Prizes cannot unbind the Prometheus of this country; only our collective action can. ●

Department of Science and Technology (DOST) / World Economic Forum

DOST Compendium of Science and Technology Statistics (2013 data)

Averages calculated from Commission of Higher Education (CHED) statistics from AY 2006-2007 to AY 2017-2018 World Rank 2017 - 2018 (out of 137 countries)

availability of the latest technologies sci. research institutions

government procurement of advanced

quality of tech products

availability of scientists and engineers

full-time researchers per million population

rnd expenditure as percent gdp (2013)

of science and math enrollees do not finish their courses

3, 218, 094 average no. of enrollees 45, 380 average no. of science and math enrollees

545, 025 average no. of graduates 7, 544 average no. of science and math graduates