Go ethanol and be free from foreign oil!

I was reading the story with a photograph of Quezon City Mayor Feliciano Belmonte giving a P5.3-million donation to my former golf mate, Southern Leyte Gov. Rosette Lerias, to rebuild the school building in Barangay Guinsaugon, which vanished in the aftermath of the mudslide and what I saw was a picture of the indomitable Filipino "can do" spirit, which we unfortunately harness only in times of tragedy. Where does a poor province like Southern Leyte turn to in times of crisis… but to our own Filipino brethren who are possessed with a heart of gold, and I see that in the person of Mayor Feliciano Belmonte and the people of Quezon City who voted him into office!

What about the rest of us? Do we need to have another crisis or tragedy in order to trigger this love for our fellow countrymen? What I’d like to see is for us Filipinos to harness this same "can do" spirit in our everyday tragedy called daily life! We Filipinos are proud to say that we are the first Democracy in Asia… the first nation to be given independence from its colonizers, but in reality… our democracy is in dire straits, thanks once again to immature politicians, who cannot even see the greatness of the Filipino "can do" spirit. Didn’t we say before that we Pinoys have run out of excuses?

As an example… in Danao City, we have homegrown experts in the gun-making industry, most of whom are illegal. Yet we know that a lot of policemen do not even possess firearms because foreign makes are too expensive. Why don’t we ask ourselves, why can’t we be like the Israelis who make the world-renowned Uzi or Galil? To think, the population of Israel is all but eight million. We’re more than 80 million Filipinos and we can’t even make our own firearms? In Danao, they make great copies of guns from the underground!

On the other side of Cebu, on the coast of Balamban, we have the nation’s biggest shipbuilding company, the Tsuneishi (Cebu) Heavy Industries Inc., that manufactures 50,000 DWT to 100,000 DWT bulk carriers, and a few kilometers away is the FMBA Marine Inc., which specializes in the manufacture of fastcraft ferries or naval seacraft. That means, if the Philippine Navy or the Coast Guard wanted to have ships, it doesn’t have to go out of the country to have one because we can build them right here!

But the question is, should we continue making fun of our own Navy as a Navy without ships? If you didn’t know, the Coast Guard got a few of its fast boats from a shipyard in Australia. Doesn’t it make you wonder why we got them there when we can build them right here? Is it because we Filipinos cannot accept the reality that we can build these vessels right here or could it be due to corruption of those buying those vessels?

Finally, I read an article saying that the Philippine Fuel-Ethanol Alliance has been holding talks with the Chamber of Automotive Manufacturers of the Philippines Inc. (CAMPI) to get an endorsement of their products. If you saw that CNN report about the world’s fuel crisis, then you would have seen that oil is not really running out; after all, there are still so many untapped areas where oil could still be found.

What the world is running out of is cheap oil, thanks to the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) which put to good use the Law of Supply and Demand, which simply means that when there are more users of oil than the supply can handle, prices would go up. With China and India joining the Western world’s love for the automobile that means oil prices would remain as high as ever.

But what caught my eye in that CNN report was, the only nation on earth that have worked feverishly toward being independent from foreign crude oil is Brazil, which, as the report goes, may just announce full independence from oil imports. The reason for Brazil’s independence from oil is ethanol, which comes from… hellooow their sugar industry! I visited Brazil when our dear friend Frank Benedicto was the Philippine ambassador there and yes, we saw that vehicles there used ethanol even in those days when the cost of fuel wasn’t as expensive as it is today.

It turned out that Brazil learned its lessons from the 1973 oil crisis and they have never turned back on the use of ethanol. Today, Brazilians do not march in the streets in protest when the prices of crude oil skyrocket. That gives them a very stable economy. This ought to be a lesson to our homegrown militants, who when fuel prices increase, are barking up the wrong tree, demanding a rollback of fuel prices despite the fact that the Philippines is not an oil-producing nation. What these militants ought to do is pressure Congress to push for laws that would allow for the wide use of ethanol in all vehicles in this country.

Well, it turned out that the Senate Energy Committee under Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago has such a bill, mandating the use of ethanol or coco-diesel. Now if you ask me, this is a step in the right direction. But they should have a more comprehensive bill that would give back some kind of subsidy to coconut or sugar workers in order to give them a better than average pay. If Congress can do this, a lot of our people would be working in sugar plantations or coconut farms just to satisfy our own fuel needs.

But like what we’ve said, the money earned from the fuel pumps should not be taken in as government revenues, rather they should be literally plowed back to the people working in the sugar and coconut industries, then the economy of the countryside would develop and soon, no one would want to be squatters in the urban metropolises of this country. I know that the Filipino can do these things. All we need is for our politicians to believe in ourselves!

* * *

Here’s an e-mailed response to our article on politicians last Monday:

"Hi! Your article is the true example of balanced and responsible journalism. You frankly and without hesitation indicated what is really happening to our very dirty and chaotic political system. Perhaps, for us to have a good political system, we must totally eliminate or eradicate the ‘trapos,’ the power-grabbers, and the dynasties. I hope other journalists will be like you so that we the people would only read factual and accurate news and not sensational journalism. Please keep up the good work… Manuel de los Reyes ([email protected])" * * * For e-mail responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through http://www.thefreeman.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow, "Straight from the Sky," shown every Monday, at 8 p.m., only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 of SkyCable.