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.
OPINION
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
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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.
SCIENTIA VOL 25 NO 3
