(Continued from April 12, 2021 issue)
WATER security should be a goal that is apart from food security. We should clean our lakes and rivers not only because of environmental concerns, but also because of water supply concerns. We should implement rainwater collection and wastewater recycling programs nationwide.
There should be an integration of water policy, so that the supply and demand for water in relation to residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural (irrigation) use will be well coordinated and rationalized. Agricultural water should be made available not only for rice production, but also for the production of fruits, vegetables, poultry and livestock.
Energy security should be measured not in terms of how much electricity that we could produce out of imported fossil fuels, but in terms of how much electricity that we could generate from local renewable and sustainable sources. At the very least, there should be equilibrium between the two sources, but the dominance of local sources would be best.
Military security should be strengthened not only by way of importing foreign assets, but also by producing our own. It may have been a good idea to buy surplus vessels from the United States and brand new vessels from Indonesia, but we could also build more naval vessels in the Cebu shipyards, considering the fact that we are already exporting the ships made there.
The rule in most developed countries is to invest about 3% of the GNP back to R&D. Since we are still a developing country, we should already start to invest about 1% of our GNP back to R&D.
Again, the DOST Secretary should become a member of the President’s economic team, if not its leader. We should make it official as a national policy that the function and responsibility of DOST is only up to the prototyping of inventions that are born out of R&D.
Beyond that, the function and responsibility of test marketing and product launching should already belong to the Department of Trade & Industry (DTI).
The role of DOST should be limited to the distribution of R&D grants to the universities and to the private sector. R&D grants to the in-house agencies and researchers of DOST should be limited to secret and confidential projects that would support national security, and would not be of commercial interest to the private sector.
We should subsidize not only the prototyping, test marketing and product launching of Filipino inventions, but also their other marketing, promotions and advertising activities, until they could get at least a 10% share of their target markets.
We should provide incentives to the private sector in terms of tax credits and holidays, so that they could conduct their own R&D in strategic areas that would be suggested by the DOST. We should create more incubation centers and fabrication laboratories in key cities nationwide, so that we could support more inventors, developers and programmers.
We should strengthen our economic diplomacy programs so that we could promote more Filipino products and inventions to other countries on one hand, and also to facilitate the inbound technology transfer of IPRs that we could not develop on our own.
The Philippines should officially join the global patent race with the same passion as we should have in joining the Olympic Games and the international beauty pageants. As of now, we are not even in the race and to do that, we should have goals as to how many patents we should produce each year.
The DOST should work more closely with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) and the DTI, so that we could invite more foreign locators that should not just bring in more money (investments) but also more technologies (inventions) that are needed to build a stronger economy with better national security./PN
