Holland – How a tiny nation became great

We complain that ‘We’re Only a Small Nation’ – but once a handful of Dutchmen portrayed the profit motive into a vast empire six times our size. They earn US$240 million a year by exporting 500 varieties of tulips and other flowers and keep a land where even if the airport is 12 feet below sea level from getting wet.

Whenever the streets of Manila flood in a rainstorm or heavy downpour, I think of the Dutch whose canal ways are neatly laid out all over the country. They not only relieve them of floods or serve as irrigation for its vast farmlands but provide electric energy propelled by windmills. Whenever I spot a long queue of cars and jeepneys clog our traffic daily, I am reminded that 17.5 million Dutch have saved gasoline by using 8.5 million bicycles instead of depending on cars alone.

The Dutch water expertise is benefiting the Philippines in a two-year project entitled "Sustainable Development of the Laguna de Bay Environment" led by WL/Delft Hydraulics. This is part of the University of Delft graduate school projects managed by IHE-Delft Project Division, now part of UNESCO, where problems on water and agriculture in developing countries are resolved.

The current problems of bacterial pollution, input of toxic substances to the tributaries and lake, flooding and loss of biodiversity has made the fishes almost extinct in the lake. The sustainability both of the human uses of the lake and of the ecology of the catchment area are threatened by the current lack of understanding regarding the way the system functions.

Being a government to government project it involves huge road constructions, including the creation of an airport, flood control works and land reclamation. It will include decongestion plans of the highly industrialized and intensely used Taguig, Parañaque, Muntinlupa, San Pedro and Biñan municipalities.

On a smaller scale Delft-IHE through its Project Office Head Atem S. Ramsundersingh is contemplating helping survey the construction of an agriculture-based boarding school in Tagaytay for children of overseas workers. Thus, last May, I joined Ofelia Mananquil-Bakker in her residence in Rotterdam. Her husband, Jack is an international Dutch tobacco trader who took along Offie and his two sons and daughter to his assignments in Surabaya, Indonesia and Singapore with a long stay in the Philippines in-between. Within two decades and a half she saw the pathetic conditions of overseas workers in Europe and Asia.

Offie is involved, herself, with the Philippine association of overseas workers. She concluded that a lasting project to help them out was to put up a boarding school for their children. She asked me to help her set this up using the Montessori system for children at least five years the grade school and a professional high school preferably a farm school. Meantime, her daughter Anne Marie who works with the Project Division of the University of Delft, has helped schedule the three-month survey by selected engineering graduate students of the Cavite school site after which the nine-month construction will take place by another group of Delft graduate students.