GOING by the sheer number of trips abroad by the secretary of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) — 14 in all starting from the day Antonia Yulo-Loyzaga was appointed as revealed by Sen. Raffy Tulfo — one would think that Loyzaga is with the Department of Tourism and not with the DENR.
Tulfo raised the question of too many foreign travels by the Environment secretary during the Senate plenary deliberation of the DENR’s P24.6-billion budget for 2024. He said Loyzaga and her officials spent P1.1 billion in foreign trips alone this year.
He asked: “What benefit did the people get from these trips?” He said previous DENR secretaries had limited foreign trips, and stayed in the country most of the time to act on various environmental problems of the nation, which were then many as they are now.
Sen. Cynthia Villar, who was then sponsoring the DENR budget, responded on behalf of the DENR, saying the money was not used by the secretary alone but also by officials of the following offices in their foreign travels: Biodiversity Management Bureau, Forest Management Bureau, Land Management Bureau, and Ecosystem’s Research and Management Bureau.
‘… whatever technical learning we might get from them is always available through modern IT which does not require physical presence.’
Villar said Loyzaga attends events abroad when only her presence was sought or indispensable, and some of these activities were funded by foreign governments which also give the Philippines financial assistance and loans to promote their environmental initiatives, such as disaster resilience. She noted the DENR was also able to secure financial and technical support for its projects from other countries, including a memorandum of understanding with Japanese and US governments, global environmental facility with European Union under Green Economy Program, and support from Asian Development Bank and World Bank.
She enumerated Loyzaga’s foreign trips: United Nations (UN) Asia Pacific Ministerial Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction, UN Framework on Climate Change, UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, UN Water Conference on Sustainable Development in New York, and UN High-Level Meeting on Midterm Review of the Sendai Framework. Villar also said Loyzaga went on official trips to Japan, Washington, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi as well.
Loyzaga’s foreign trips are scheduled to last until December.
We note it is not only Tulfo who had publicly noticed the DENR secretary’s foreign trips that are more numerous than the ordinary. Columnist Rigoberto Tiglao had complained that Loyzaga was nowhere to be found in the early days of the Mindoro oil spill disaster, and if she had done anything to mitigate the maritime and environmental catastrophe, it was not felt much by any of the stakeholders in the region.
We doubt if Villar’s mention of the establishment by President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. of the Water Resources Management Office (WRMO) as Loyzaga’s idea could hold water. We know for a fact that there are several pending bills about a department of water resources management but these have not been moving. The WRMO was Malacañang’s stop-gap measure.
While Loyzaga is always away, there is this DENR report that only 709 enterprises out of about 4,000 large corporations submitted their plans under the Expanded Producer Responsibility law or Republic Act 11898, which mandates companies to manage their plastic waste.
It is correct to point out that Loyzaga should always be available on the ground to act on problems here. Let foreigners handle their own, and whatever technical learning we might get from them is always available through modern IT which does not require physical presence.
