Take Back Control of National Industrial Development from US and Foreign Interests! Defend National Patrimony! Reclaim Economic Sovereignty and Ecological Integrity!
At a time when the Philippine government cannot even keep pace with the accelerating climate crisis, it has found all the urgency in the world to rush through a rigged agreement – one that will only push the already exposed and vulnerable Filipinos into deeper inequality, injustice, and climate catastrophe.
The Campaign to RECLAIM Economic Sovereignty and Ecological Integrity, a united front of 35 national coalitions, political organizations, and peoples’ movements of workers, farmers, fisherfolk, women, urban poor, youth, and faith-based groups, rejects the BBM Government’s abandonment of sovereignty and opposes the Pax Silica Security Framework Agreement, and the United States (US)-led Luzon Economic Corridor (LEC). A project of this scale and magnitude must not be bound by a diplomatic deadline. The Philippines is already saving itself from dire conditions—political rot, inefficient privatized basic services, and the climate emergency. The proposed 4,000-acre high-tech and industrial hub has no business moving forward when the country stands to lose its sovereignty, land, water, food, and the peoples’ very survival to this project. Worse, the Philippines will only serve the interests of the US and its allies.
Pax Silica is a US-led, non-binding initiative to strengthen secure and resilient supply chains related to critical minerals, semiconductors, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced manufacturing, and related technologies. It was launched in December 2025 amid growing US-China competition over technology and critical minerals, and is explicitly framed by US officials as a way to reduce reliance on and counter China's dominance in these sectors.
The arrangement is designed to secure supply chains for American and allied industries. This is the same pattern of third-world nations caught between superpowers. What they ask for is no longer consent to build projects, but they ask for territories, resources, and immunities; then they call it a partnership. It is clear that Pax Silica is not a Philippine industrial strategy that just happens to have foreign partners, but a trap dressed up as a good deal for economic growth and resilience, one that structurally serves someone else’s interests.
Under LEC, energy projects include fuel storage facilities, hydropower, nuclear cooperation supported by the US, and a 72-kilometer pipeline that connects Olongapo, Subic, and Basa Air Base in Pampanga. LEC is really a corridor for environmental and economic doom.
RECLAIM calls it what it is: a new colonialism where lands and resources are not only taken by force but by agreements and frameworks governed by foreign control. When profits are exported, value-added systems stay abroad; the only thing left for Filipinos is exposure on every front. First, losing sovereignty over land, water, and food, and then absorbing the fallout of escalating geopolitical tensions in trade, security, technology, and the economy.
This system of extraction and exploitation is not only dangerous but already a death sentence in the middle of a climate emergency the people did not create and could no longer afford to deepen. The Philippines is already struggling for climate survival and is now forced to fight for sovereignty against the very forces accelerating the country’s own collapse.
The indigenous peoples will pay first. Their ancestral lands must not be treated as collateral damage. While the government insists Pax Silica sits outside the titled ancestral domains, the country’s own Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) process moves at a crawl. Pax Silica would cause a second wave of displacement for Aeta and peasant communities already displaced by the original New Clark City development.
The site itself sits near critical watersheds, with alarms raised about potential strain on and contamination of these watersheds by heavy metals and toxic chemicals processed at these hubs. It will operate within a protected forest and agricultural area, where a significant share of the region’s food is produced. This not only puts ecological systems and biodiversity at risk but also further threatens the food security of communities already facing surging pressures on land and water to sustain food production amidst the climate crisis.
Pax Silica would also put new mining pressure on provinces already scarred by decades of extraction, and on a multi-gigawatt (GW) power demand that risks reinforcing fossil-fuel and unproven nuclear pathways rather than the country’s renewable energy (RE) transition.
The Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) said the Pax Silica hub in Tarlac is looking to build its own energy infrastructure to meet its expected energy requirement of three to five GW, while the Department of Energy (DOE) said nuclear power developers could supply electricity to the incoming project. The same power players, such as Manila Electric Co. (Meralco) and Aboitiz Power Corp. (AboitizPower), have already expressed interest in developing nuclear projects.
It is gruesome to entrust the country’s fate to these AI hubs to be handled by energy giants that made the Philippines fossil-fuel reliant and culprits who are pushing for dirty and deadly energy resources, such as nuclear, as false solutions and touting them as “clean” energy. Their cards in wreaking havoc on our ancestral domains and posing grave threats to the already forsaken agricultural situation in the wake of the ongoing Super El Niño are continuously being laid down by the same government, exuding connivance in maintaining this system that lets its people down.
It is a great mistake and a futility to allow the same big companies to take charge of this AI endeavor, given the grim history and current reality of them undermining due process, environmental laws, and peoples’ rights just to construct coal plant after fossil gas plant in Batangas, Quezon, Bataan, and other parts of our country.
The Philippines is already battered by one project after another as the government continues to prioritize profit over the people and the environment. It's loathsome and tiring to say this over and over again, as the government and its business-centered super-rich accomplices continue to disrupt peoples’ lives and destroy the planet.
It is dangerous that the government is working overtime to defend a project lacking transparency and consultation. Reference to safeguards only points to compliance. Yet even the existing environmental and social safeguards have well-documented gaps, and history shows that these gaps routinely allow projects to proceed while community concerns remain unresolved. Worse, BCDA, the very same agency mandated to convert former US military bases into assets for the country’s growth and development, is the one leading the charge to hand those same lands back to another US-led agenda.
The farmers, fisherfolk, environmental groups, and climate groups must slam the project proponents’ hypocritical whole-of-government approach to Pax Silica and lambast their false narrative that the project is a national development issue. The only thing they want to develop is the same lewd tactics in this rotten system they maintain.
The Philippines will not be saved by another ticking time bomb of a project that whispers words of development and progress; it will be damned by the same old players by the same old playbook. We simply cannot afford to take another huge extraction-and-destruction blow. Our nation must learn from its mistakes, hold perpetrators accountable, and save what’s left of our resources. ###
ABOUT THE COALITION
The RECLAIM Economic Sovereignty and Ecological Integrity is a coalition of 35 founding members from civil society, including national coalitions, political organizations, non-government organizations, people’s movements, faith-based groups, and youth and community organizations. Its members include 31 organizations and four regional chapters of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ). The founding members are Asian Peoples’ Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD), Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC); Task Force Detainees of the Philippines (TFDP); Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA); Altertrade Foundation Philippines Inc.; Aniban ng mga Manggagawa sa Agrikultura (AMA); Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP); Concerned Citizens of Sta. Cruz, Zambales (CCOS); Conference of Major Superiors in the Philippines – Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation Commission (CMSP-JPICC); ; Gitib, Inc.; Integrated Rural Development Foundation Inc. (IRDF); Kilusan para sa Pambansang Demokrasya (KILUSAN); Kilusan para sa Repormang Agraryo at Katarungang Panlipunan (KATARUNGAN); Koalisyon Isalbar Ti Pintas ti La Union (KIPLU); Kongreso ng Pagkakaisa ng Maralitang Lungsod (KPML); Mayon Integrated Development Alternatives and Services Inc. (MIDAS); NGO Forum on the ADB; Nuclear/Coal-Free Bataan Movement (NFBM); K4K-QC; Oriang Women’s Movement; Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid sa Pilipinas (PKMP); Pambansang Koalisyon ng mga Kababaihan sa Kanayunan (PKKK); Partido Lakas ng Masa (PLM); Philippine Alliance of Human Rights Advocates (PAHRA); PMCJ and its regional chapters in Cebu, Eastern Visayas, Davao, and Western Mindanao; Sanlakas; Stop the War Coalition; Tambuyog Development Center; Teachers Dignity Coalition (TDC); Youth for Climate Justice (Y4CJ); Zone One Tondo Organization (ZOTO); and Partido Sosyalista.
For inquiries, contact:
Sheila Abarra
Senior Media and Communications Officer
Philippine Movement for Climate Justice
Viber: +63-991-669-2356
WhatsApp: +63-938-089-8327
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