Militarized

First the good news: there are enough natural gas deposits underneath Recto Bank to last us a century. Exploratory drills confirm the substantial deposits. All we need now are investors ready to bring in the heavy machinery needed to exploit the resource.

Now the bad news: the stakes are now even higher for all the nations with competing claims for the islands scattered in the South China Sea (what we now prefer to call the West Philippine Sea). As we saw in the current standoff at Scarborough Shoal (Panatag), the competing claims now need to be backed up by a show of military force.

At Scarborough Shoal, China now maintains an average of two naval vessels around the clock, seven days a week, to assert its claim. The Philippines is forced to match that naval presence — notwithstanding we do not have enough ships to rotate on duty on blue waters.

Fortunately, we recently inherited a Hamilton-class cutter from the US Navy. That cutter, rescued from the breaking wharf, is about half-a-century old. Refitted for combat duty, it is now the flagship of our proud Navy.

We will soon receive a second Hamilton-class cutter from the Americans. That will give us the capability to assert naval presence at Recto Bank.

The Philippine Navy cutter is backed up two equally venerable Coast Guard patrol boats named Edsa and Edsa Dos. The British Navy used both boats extensively at their former Hong Kong base. When the British returned the Crown Colony to China, the two boats, being too fragile to make the trip back to England, found their way to our possession.

We will need all the seaworthy vessels we can get our hands on. The legal aspect of the contending claims for the uninhabitable islets littering the South China Sea will not be satisfactorily resolved for decades to come. International law may have the principles but not the mechanisms for decisively resolving competing territorial claims.

Much is been made about Manila bringing the matter of possession of Scarborough Shoal to the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). That is a sound diplomatic recourse. It is, in fact, our only recourse.

When we declared our territorial baselines to include Scarborough Shoal as part of Philippine territory, China neglected posing an objection. In normal municipal law, they are now estopped from pursuing their claim.

At the level of international law, however, sovereign nations may choose to submit to international arbitration or not. The concept of national sovereignty insulates nations from effective enforcement of rulings. They may submit to such rulings only voluntarily.

That is the catch. Every indication we have is that China will not submit to international arbitration on the matter of competing claims. Instead, as we now see in the Spratlys, Beijing prefers to exercise effective occupation of contested territory. He superior military muscle gives her that option.

The more natural resources are discovered in the contested islands, therefore, the greater the tendency for China to station naval forces to enforce the claims. Our only recourse is to match that naval presence, as we have in maintaining a Marine base on Kalayaan island.

This can only lead to the permanent militarization of the contested South China Sea island. Maintaining permanent military presence on contested territory will cost all parties. The costs are imposed by geopolitical considerations and are inescapable, unfortunately.

Unspent

There is a price to pay for not using official development assistance, unfortunately. When government agencies prove less than efficient in running foreign-assisted projects or utilizing grants in a timely manner, the Philippine government pays commitment fees for the unused money.

In the case of the Department of Health, the COA reports that the Philippine Government was forced to pay out P79 million in penalties because the agency failed to utilize grants and loans for foreign assisted projects. This is sad. It will also seem most absurd.

Most of the foreign assisted projects intend to deliver affordable and financial health services to the poorest of the poor. From the point of view of the intended beneficiaries, this is double-jeopardy: not only where the foreign-assisted projects (FAPs) not fully undertaken, the agency had to divert P79 million from its funds to pay the penalties.

Unfortunately, no one gets actual punishment for bureaucratic failure. The COA, in its report, simply observes that the DOH “has a low absorptive capacity as far as the implementation of FAPs, which resulted in the non-attainment of objectives.”

 Beyond the dense bureaucratic language, what the COA report is actually saying is that the poor communities were severely penalized by bureaucratic inefficiency. The failure to use loans and grants may be due to any number of factors that the DOH must now explain to the people. These factors may range from sheer lack of personnel to execute the FAPs to the lack of local counterpart funding to cause the release of the contracted assistance.

If the DOH cannot implement the FAPs anyway, there is little sense in contracting them in the first place. Contracts involving foreign assistance normally carry non-implementation penalties or commitment fees. This recognizes the costs incurred by foreign donors in setting aside funds to support projects mutually agreed.

Failure to implement projects undermines our credibility before foreign donors, whose precious assistance we direly need. It obviously leads to much waste. When a foreign assisted project is contracted, therefore, there should be no room for noynoying.

 There should be a way to penalize agencies and bureaucrats other than merely observing they have “low absorptive capacity.” Their failure, after all, is eventually a cost inflicted on the public coffers.