VIDEO:

TRANSCRIPT:

Speech
of
His Excellency Benigno S. Aquino III
President of the Philippines
During the courtesy call by the participants of the 6^th Ambassadors, Consuls General, and Tourism Directors’ Tour

[As delivered at the Rizal Hall, Malacañan Palace on July 19, 2011]

Magandang umaga po sa inyong lahat

To our kababayans who have come here from the U.S. and Canada: you have come a long way just so you could join this tour and see your home country once again. And so as your President, allow me to say: welcome home.

I imagine I am only one person of many who have given you a warm welcome in this country. In the tours you have gone on, you must have seen breathtaking parts of our beautiful country; you must have eaten a lot of delicious meals and gained, hopefully, a few pounds—the chicken adobo, the sisig, or probably even some have tried again the famed balut that some of you must sorely miss, reminding you even further that you are indeed home. But most of all, on your travels, I believe that you must have met plenty of good people—Filipinos who display and take to heart the hospitality we are all proud of, and who make visiting the Philippines a truly unique experience. I hear that there are still some additional trips for you after this meeting, so I hope you still have the time and energy to ride even more buses and planes to continue your exploration of our homeland.

I—and the rest of our people—am proud of the success you have enjoyed in the U.S. and Canada. In fact, I hear that Filipinos in your countries are two of the top senders of overseas Filipino remittances. So this I believe is a well-deserved rest you are all taking. I thank the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Department of Tourism, and the Department of Trade and Industry for making this possible for all of you.

Many Filipinos who get to visit the tourism capitals of our country usually end up wondering the same thing: “Why is the Philippines not the world tourist destination it can undoubtedly become?” After all, many of our neighbors run highly successful tourism campaigns. The answer for this is simple: Nobody has ever paid enough attention to the tourism sector; and we know this, which is why under our administration, the tourism sector is finally getting the attention it rightfully deserves.

Why are we doing this? At the bottom line is a better life for the Filipino people. Tourism means jobs. Every person visiting this country means more opportunities for the cab driver who will bring them to their hotels, for the small entrepreneur who will sell them shirts or bracelets, for all the people who trained and dedicated their professional lives to making sure that a visit to the Philippines will be a comfortable and memorable one.

We have focused on promoting tourism hubs around the archipelago, most prominently the Puerto Princesa Underground River, which, by the way, has reached the final round of the New 7 Wonders of Nature. We have launched a nationwide campaign encouraging our countrymen to vote for it, as the distinction will without doubt improve tourism in Puerto Princesa, and that success will extend to the rest of the Philippines. In fact, allow me to take this opportunity to encourage all of you as well to vote for our Underground River right now by texting PPUR to 2861.

We have a population of roughly, about 95 million, and of the 95 million we have 80 million or 85 million cellphones texting billions of messages everyday. We will just want a small portion of that.

We have also been expanding infrastructure, which will lead to an increase in our number of visitors. Just last month I was in Boracay—unfortunately, not for a vacation, but to inaugurate the new Caticlan Airport there, which aims to have the island reach around three million visitors a year once the runways are extended. Tourism Secretary Bertie Lim has also targeted 77 tourism development areas across the country, and the success of his efforts will depend largely on infrastructure that will serve as the foundations of progress.

We have taken steps to liberalize aviation as well, which will effectively allow our tourists access to friendlier air fares and to more plane rides to our tourist destinations. Simply put, we are making it easier and less tiring for them to reach their destinations, which allows them a better experience altogether.

We are also addressing the issue of the Philippines being given a category 2 status by the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), as well as the banning of Philippine aviation in Europe, both of which happened as a result of the quality of our personnel training and our facilities. Last March, I gave the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines a direct mandate to get us off these lists, and they have been making progress, having already invested in the necessary personnel by hiring international experts to train them. They are making steady progress on this and other areas and I am confident that we will have more skillful professionals, better facilities, and a better standing in the international aviation community.

I am happy to announce that these initiatives of ours have already borne fruit. For perspective, we had 3.2 million visitors here in the period between July 2009 and June 2010, but according to the most recent reports forded me, the visitor count in the same period during this administration has risen to more than 3.7 million visitors. I am confident that if we continue our initiatives, these numbers will continue to rise.

But our success doesn’t mean this job is over. Our neighbors still get far more visitors than us—Thailand, for example, welcomes almost 16 million visitors every year. Malaysia welcomes over 24.5 million. So we have a lot of catching up to do. But make no mistake about it: our administration fully intends to fulfill its duty to the people; and we will not let up until the Philippines once again lives up to its name as the Pearl of the Orient.

Those of you here today have, in the past few days, seen firsthand how truly beautiful this country is and how friendly our people are. And it is my hope that just as we are proud of you for finding success in foreign lands, for showing the capabilities of the Filipino to the world—that you continue showing your pride for country as well. If a friend of yours back in the States or in Canada asks you where to take a relaxing vacation, I hope you can look back on your time here and tell them that our country is one that they should visit as soon as they can. More than our own government’s efforts, we need the help of proud Filipinos to get our country on the global tourist maps.

And before I end: these times truly are exciting for our country. Things that we thought were intractable problems are now getting solved with simple solutions that only needed political will to have been done. For instance, our country is visited by 23 typhoons a year, hence we have a lot of areas—66 of our provinces, actually, have areas that are disaster-risk prone. And whereas before, our countrymen will probably say, “Bahala na ang Diyos sa atin,” today we are helping ourselves by putting up things like the water-level sensors for our rivers to give us better warnings for flooding. There are sensors being placed on areas prone to landslides that again use technology like the cellphone sites to transmit data way, way ahead to warn our countrymen of impending landslides.

Even dengue, which is now a year-round problem, has already suffered, whereas we have been successful in getting a drop of about 11 percent of the incidents. One of the methods used was a very simple mosquito trap developed by our own scientists under the Department of Science and Technology. This trap is but a mere can with a piece of wood—either colored black or burned plank—which attracts the mosquitoes that deposit their larvae on this trap. Once deposited, the larvae gets into a solution made primarily of pepper and water, kills 80 percent of the larvae. The 20 percent that remain have a life expectancy that is half. We have not been able to deploy it—in the rest of the country, we have something like 60,000 houses already protected, but we are giving up for production, because the tests really have been proving very, very successful.

We might even have, in not too short a time, our own light-rail systems developed, engineered, manufactured in the country, which will be but a fraction of the cost of what it takes us now to provide the light-rail systems.

In essence, we are also happy that we have gathered jobs to tune of about 1.4 million additional jobs, comparing April last year to April this year. And what we are proud of is it is the private sector that has been generating most of the jobs—only 400,000 of the 1.4 came from government direct efforts.

Hence we invite all of you: we finally see the beginning of daylight—we want to be in daylight for the rest of our term and for the years after that. Join us as we rebuild our country. Join us as we transform our country.

Thank you. Good day.