President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr. has brought home investment pledges from Indonesia and Singapore that's 5,000 times the amount of the Office of the President's (OP) travel budget for the latter half of 2022.
This was highlighted by House Deputy Speaker and Batangas 6th district Rep. Ralph Recto in a statement Friday, Sept. 10, or just a few days after the Chief Executive arrived home from his back-to-back state visits.
Recto said that the P805 billion worth of investment commitments that Marcos brought home dwarfed the P157 million local and foreign travel allocation of the OP from June to December of the year.
“Yung isang byahe pa lang, bawing-bawi na (He made up for it in just one trip),” Recto said.
“Maliit lang ang share ng OP under President BBM sa (The OP under President BBM has a meager share in the) total government travel budget this year of P20.22 billion. Mga 77 centavos lang out of P100 (That's only 77 centavos for every P100)," he said.
As Covid-19 retreats and borders open, Recto said “zoom diplomacy should shift to face-to-face engagements – unless one is a fan of North Korea".
He said the president is better off promoting the country’s interest “across the table, in a room, than remotely via a TV screen.”
Marcos's Indonesia and Singapore trips took place from Sept. 4 to 7.
As the country grapples with the combined blows of the pandemic and the food and fuel shocks unleashed by the war in Ukraine, “many of the solutions to these problems lie outside our shores", the former senator said.
Recto cited in particular the country’s need for fertilizers, which “the President’s trip to Jakarta gave him the opportunity to personally ask Indonesian President Widodo to allocate more for the Philippines".
One in six sacks of fertilizer sold in the country come from Indonesia, Recto said.
Because global prices for fertilizer have skyrocketed by as much as 300 percent over the past year, our “fertilizer vulnerability” could cause rice harvest to plunge, triggering the need for more rice imports, he noted.
“Kaya yun ang pakiusap ng ating Pangulo kay Widodo, kasi alam nya kung gaano kahalaga ang fertilizer sa ating bansa ngayon (He knows just how important fertilizers are to the country right now, that's why he made this request to Widodo),” Recto said of Marcos.