PCMP revisited

There are ideas in the not-so-distant past that have to be revisited. The need to review them is compelled by the fact that while they were once ballyhooed to hold appreciable amounts of promise, their high strung proponents either shied away from pushing their vision thru obstacles posed by detractors or simply lost steam. In other cases, those who had the power of bringing them to fruition plainly faltered.

Bridging the late 60’S and the early 70’s was a high sounding industrial program called the Progressive Car Manufacturing Program (PCMP) of the late Pres. Ferdinand E. Marcos. My vague recollection of it was that it was launched as a program to lead our country towards eventually producing a car of our very own. Right, a Philippine made car! It was a project that was supposedly to be contributed in and/or participated by the country’s existing car dealers.

Actually, my poor memory of the PCMP was rooted in our student activism days. Back then, I thought that ours being an agricultural rather than an industrial country, government should back up all efforts towards re-distributing lands from the few rich oligarchs to the hands of the more numerous poor. That simple.

Looking hind sight, I could concede that the adoption of the PCMP, would have been timely. Government called it progressive because the amount of locally made parts to be incorporated to a finished product was supposed to increase steadily over a certain period of time.

Early on, we started tinkering with some cars making them hybrid of sort. Per PCMP mandate, vehicles of foreign designs had to incorporate locally made parts. A certain percentage of cars ready for delivery to customers had to have local components. They even had indigenous names like Sakbayan which was a square-bodied super structure put on top of a Volkswagen Beetle chassis. There was a Ford Fiera and the Toyota Tamaraw.

I would not remember though whether it would reach a point when an entire unit would be fully Philippine made or not. In any case, had gfovernment pursued the plan relentlessly, we would have come out with a car mostly, if not entirely, of Philippine concept or design and we could have done so much ahead of Malaysia’s Proton.

Recently, Mr. Henry Co, of the Ford Group Philippines mentioned that the Philippines could still catch up as auto production hub for ASEAN. Without unequivocally mentioning the PCMP, now obviously shelved, he was, in theory, revisiting the abortive Marcos project in a modified form. I take it to mean that. in its revised plan, we still can come up with a Philippine made car on the foundations of the PCMP

Mr. Co’s idea is for the local government units to join hands in this effort. He must be cognizant of the fact that from different areas of the country, we can source the various parts of a sedan. So, each leading city of a given region may be asked to focus on a given auto part or set of parts. For example, is it not that from the bowels of the region where Iligan City is a part of steel is produced? For another, do we know that from the strands of the abaca of Southern Leyte, reputedly the best in the world, Daimler Benz is now coming out with products used in the baggage compartments of its later models? Or that wire harnesses (for a car’s electrical connections) are currently being shipped out of Lapulapu’s MEPZ?

Mr. Co’s well deserved point is for the LGU’s to provide the right atmosphere where their known products can be tapped and engineered (with government sponsored scientists), as components of a Philippine made car. He could very well refer to tax shelters or other incentives. Cebu City can be more aggressive in providing a space at its South Road Property as the assembly plant not dissimilar to the Ford original production line in Detroit where all parts are put together.

Truly, Mr. Co, has pointed us back to a forgotten direction. If he gets the cooperation and support of all our government leaders and industry players, a restart is, at this point in our history, as good as it was few decades ago.

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