09/10/2026
PBBM IS ‘TERRIBLY EXCITED’ OVER PAX SILICA WHILE THE PEOPLE ARE TERRIBLY APPREHENSIVE
While President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is “terribly excited” about Pax Silica, the Filipino people have every reason to be terribly apprehensive about its disastrous implications for our land, resources, livelihood, environment, national sovereignty, and security.
Marcos is beside himself with excitement at welcoming the US military-industrial-big tech complex to our shores. But what he hails as a grand opportunity to move up the global AI value chain is actually a dangerous scheme to turn the Philippines into a strategic US supply chain hub and forward military base in one.
For indigenous peoples and farming communities, Pax Silica threatens displacement from ancestral domains and agricultural lands, loss of livelihoods, and further plunder of their resource-rich communities. The massive extraction of critical minerals to feed the US-controlled AI supply chain threatens to intensify destructive mining and environmental degradation across the country.
For ordinary Filipinos, Pax Silica raises the specter of worsening water and energy insecurity. Its semiconductor facilities, AI infrastructure, and associated industries need enormous amounts of water and electricity, competing with the needs of households, farmers, and local industries. The project also raises serious concerns over industrial waste, pollution, and other long-term environmental costs that host communities will be forced to bear.
More fundamentally, Pax Silica threatens to further undermine Philippine sovereignty by completely subordinating our industrial development, natural resources, and economic policies to the geopolitical interests of the United States. While every postcolonial regime has failed to undertake a policy of genuine national industrialization, this time the Marcos Jr. regime is invoking so-called industrial development to serve Washington's strategic competition with China.
Pax Silica further extinguishes any semblance of an independent foreign policy and drags the country closer to war. Given the expanding network of US bases, troops, and military facilities in our territory, Marcos is making the Philippines a clear and immediate target in a potential US-China armed confrontation.
Marcos waxes enthusiastic about the claimed benefits of Pax Silica but has failed to acknowledge and address these fundamental concerns. His administration has yet to demonstrate how the project will uphold the interests and protect affected communities, safeguard our diminishing natural resources, defend national sovereignty, or just keep the country out of an inter-imperialist war.
The Filipino people are not opposed to technological progress or industrial development. What we reject is a model of development dictated by foreign powers, controlled by multinational corporations and US defense contractors, and designed to serve the economic and military supremacy of US imperialism at the expense of our people.
Instead of getting terribly excited over Pax Silica, Marcos should be terribly ashamed about the country's continuing semi-feudal economic backwardness and import dependence, unrelenting environmental destruction, and growing vulnerability to US-instigated wars.
