Let's discuss what is the role, the current role of science and technology in the country right now and then let's ask ourselves what do we need to do and what can be done at the moment. Now, maganda sa pakinggan sa Filipino today. Ang adhama teknolohiya sa Pilipinas ay bansot at atasahan.
It's easier to understand rather than say it's stunted and underdeveloped. It is stunted or gone soot because it did not have the opportunity to grow. It did not grow as we would want it to.
There are many who are good, many who are smart, but we don't use or do what we can do. because there are some structural problems that are there. Now, underdeveloped means we can still do a lot. This is not yet the peak of Philippine capabilities.
We can do a lot with what we have. We can do a lot by improving what we have. And therefore, there's a lot of things that we can do with science and technology. The problem is we're not there yet.
We're very far from that position. Thank you. If we ask surveys among ASEAN countries and our neighbors, we're actually going to be very high.
Numerically, number 45 out of 46 for science, 43 out of 45 for math. Therefore, if you look at it, numerically high, but you're really at the end of the line. They're not really prepared to do science and technology, and if they, after K-12, most of them would not get into the STEM.
STEMCRAP, most of them will not be scientists or engineers. So this is obvious in education. It's obvious in, as I've said earlier, your Filipino 13-year-old is ill-prepared in science and math.
Only 60%, 65% of our high schools would have science equipment. And therefore, 35% will just draw their experiments from the board and tell the students. This is what will happen if we had experiment. And that's not the way to do science. To do science effectively, you have to have hands-on experience.
In other words, you cannot imagine electricity unless you see a light bulb light. You cannot imagine the cell phone until you actually hold the cell phone and use it. You cannot just describe that. And that is what really happens. happens not only in the basic science but even in the applied science in many areas not only in the high school but also in the tertiary level.
Now in industrial growth, it's much more evident. The evidence that I will point to is the lack of jobs. Kaya walang trabaho ang ating mga manggagawa ay kasi wala namang pagawaan sa pang-ibig.
The lack of industries is one big reflection. of the lack of industrial capacity in the country. We don't have basic industries, we don't have any ways to make things that we would be using. Now, and of course without industries you don't have jobs, and without jobs you don't have a future.
Now this is one of my favorite slides, it's a graph, it's a graph of the GDP, the gross domestic production of the country in terms of production, service. and public utilities. 100% that's the whole economy and that's from 1946 to 2008. There's a second part of the slide.
The data is actually up to 2012. Now the first thing that you would notice is that since after the war, 1946, Agriculture has been steadily going down. That's green. Now, agriculture is very important in the country because it's the way that we will feed our nation. Now, the fact is 70% of our people... engaged in agriculture.
7 out of 10 is engaged in agriculture. And if you look at it, in 1946, 41% of our economy is agricultural. Right now, that 41% has gone down to less than 10%.
And the problem there is, of course... It's not that we cannot just feed ourselves, that's one of the most evident problems for students like you. The problem would be that the 70% that is engaged in agriculture is now just...
sharing a very, very small part. That's not even the problem, the bigger problem. The bigger problem is in production, in the manufacturing part. The manufacturing part, that's the gray dashed line.
So manufacturing. in first agriculture is equal to the blue line which is production. So the manufacturing part, the dashed gray line, is actually the ones that make the things that we use.
Your computer, your chair, your clothes, your food, etc. The things that you use. And if you would see, after the war we don't really have production.
That's obvious because all industrial production has been destroyed during the war. But it has steadily increased but just plateaued. or stayed there at around 23% on the average since 1950s. So, our productive capacity of the Philippines has stayed relatively flat since the 1950s. In terms of percentage, we were just producing whatever we have produced in the 1950s as a percentage of our economy.
Our economy is growing, and our economy is still growing. It's growing numerically, you know, in terms of numbers. But in terms of part of our economy, we haven't really been producing that much.
We're just producing roughly one-fourth of our economy is in production. What's the problem if we don't produce our products? If you need something, go to the store. The problem of the lack of things that you would be needing in everyday life will be the problem.
So, you'll go to a mall, all the things there are important. Not because by choice, of course there are very posh malls there. But because there's nothing being produced here, everything will be imported over.
You go to a sari-sari store, not necessarily your trendiest place to buy things, but you will not find anything that is produced here except for for a very few items. So even our condiments, even our, I mean this is the usual joke, even our toothpick is made outside. That's true.
Not just the toothpick, most of the things that you would use. Now if there is ever production here is mostly very small okay not a very large scale production or if it's being produced here then it has a very large import component what do you think is the biggest export of the time It's something that you cannot eat. It's something that you actually use every day. It's hardest is electronics.
You would wonder, electronics? So that means if I go in recto, okay, no, recto, then I can buy electronics at a very very reduced price because it's your top export and therefore there must be a wash with electronics but we're not. That largest export has a very very large import component. In other words, to produce the electronics that we export, we import everything else. What do we do?
What do we add? All the things that we add is just labor. Now the problem, of course, is the labor costs here in the Philippines are very low. Pababa ang pasweldo, etc. And therefore, you don't really do any science and technology anymore.
You just assemble things, you export them. That's it. And that is gone.
Even after the government has tried to recalculate changing baselines, the trend of production going down, manufacturing going flat, agriculture falling is actually the same. So we're... what has taken up our economy?
I mean, why are we not dead? That means something is actually giving jobs, however small, to our economy. services services like call centers back-end offices the service crews that you actually encounter in fast food the rentals that you have etc these are services now what What is the very distinct nature of services?
The problem with services is that you don't really get to hold anything from services. You call a call center, you don't bring home anything. You get a service.
You rent a house, the rental itself is a service. So the services do not really produce material objects. The problem, of course, as I said earlier, if you need something, It will not come from services. So that's the whole problem of our economy right now.
We don't produce a lot. We're not an industrial economy. We're pre-industrial.
We're still agrarian but backward. at that backward in the sense that even up until now 2018 we still have people in doing agriculture by literally pushing their their their animals and literally doing artisanal work by hand by the way and that's a very low productivity way of doing Even if you give them tractors, they don't really own the land. Nothing comes to them.
So what do we do? What do Filipinos do? If there are no jobs here, what do most of your titos, titas, nanay, tatay do?
They go out. They go abroad. Most of our, well, 10%, now around 11%, 10 to 11% of our Filipino labor force is actually outside of the country.
And that's one way of finding jobs. But do you know how much the jobs... in Saudi right now is is actually the same as the entry-level construction worker here in the country.
There is no difference. That just means that people, Filipinos, would take any job opportunity even if it's outside of the country, even if they don't have to come home. Okay?
And this headline is not surprising anymore. That was was last year you can actually find that this trend has been going up the joblessness in fact it was surprising that even our Philippine statistics Authority does not report joblessness anymore they report the percentage of those who have jobs so negative element of joblessness but this is actually increasing since last few years. Now, most of you would be 18 to 24, right?
Or wish to be 18 to 24. Where do I divide? So half of you, it can be my left or my right, will not have jobs if you try to find jobs right now. In fact, more than half, 52% of your age range cannot find jobs.
find jobs. It doesn't matter if you're from FAU, from UST, from UP, or any of those top universities. Because, on the average, maybe you haven't gotten it yet, you'd be your age group will have difficulties in finding jobs and that's the promise of the job market that you can find jobs if you have a good education but in this economy a good education is not a very big assurance that you will find jobs why it's not because you don't have credentials it's because the economy cannot absorb the labor force that we're producing right now. It's even the researchers in the government.
And she's now an undersecretary of in the DTI. And she has been saying that we need to have manufacturing. They did try to have a manufacturing resurgence, but this still is the main characterization of our.
economy. We don't produce things. If ever we have production, we have extraction on one end, so we do have mining. We do have sales at the other end, right?
But we don't have production in the middle. So what do we do if you need metal? If you need iron? What do you do? We do have iron ore.
We need iron in buildings. But we don't actually produce iron bars. So what we do is to export the iron ore and then buy it back.
It's cheaper, it's more expensive. It's more expensive, obviously. The value that that cost there is because it tries to reflect the value added.
The value added is transforming that ore to steel. We don't have those value added in the here. Now value-adding is part of science and technology and engineering.
If you have new processes to make better steel then you can sell your steel at a higher price. But do you really need metal? electrical engineers?
Do you really need any chemistry? Because you don't really have that production. You don't have that need. Maybe you would need structural engineers because you're building things, but at the cost maybe you just need one. You don't need thousands, right?
You might need mining engineers, but probably not those experienced because all you need to find is the rock. And that's the problem. So you cannot really develop your science and technology because we don't have those industries in India. So what do we do? We have low value added manufacturing.
I don't have low value added manufacturing. manufacturing yesterday I was in an electronics company they import as I said earlier a lot of their electronics resistors capacitors all the parts all they do is to really put it together You put them together and then make a radio for your car, make a device for your computer, etc. We do manufacture hard disks in the Philippines, so even the hardest computer is...
sometimes made in the Philippines but all they do is actually assemble and most of our production is in that state so do you really need PhDs in chemistry etc how many of those that you and therefore it's not surprising to find scientists to go out It's not just ordinary professionals, it's even our highly trained scientists and engineers going out of the country, nurses as well, medical professionals, etc., who actually go and seek employment elsewhere. The reason? We don't really have places for them in our economy. They can participate in the economy but sometimes not as scientists or engineers. And if you actually look around and find where are our experts, you will find in general we're around again very high, 96 out of 139. Well, numerically, I'm sorry.
At least we can be tall and tall. Numerically high but we're at the tail end as well. And what this means is that if you're looking for an expert, more often than not, we cannot find the experts. Okay, there's roughly around 100 PhDs in physics in the country.
And this is roughly 100 million people. That makes me a one in a million guy, right? After five seconds, I'm lonely again.
And in fact, the weight... will actually press on my shoulders because there's one million people in the Philippines that are actually depending on me to decide or to give anything information, model anything in physics. Sagot ko ang isang milyon.
That's not a nice thing to think about. And it's even worse for a lot of other scientific professionals. If we're actually going to... To add together all the scientists and engineers, do you know how many are there? That includes all the experts here in FDU.
Would you guess? Would anybody guess? There's only 10,000, we talked 9,870 research scientists and engineers. In other words, those who are really engaged in research.
You only have 10,000 in the whole country, about 10 million. You won't be surprised if there's a disaster, you'll see the same person. You'll see one person, but that's just him.
You'll see him, you'll hug him. Maybe he'll disappear. Maybe it's the same thing.
We really have a dearth of experts. I know some of the people here in your University Research Fellows, they're the only ones. You don't really have a lot of people.
And therefore, It's very important that scientists or science students would actually try to develop and become more experts and stay here in the country. That includes everything. chemistry, physics, basic sciences, economics, etc. Because if you stay here, then you add more number to whatever the people would need the experts. It's hard because if the Filipinos need it, we don't have anything.
The reason here is partly because you don't really have a lot of funding. But even if you double the funding, even if you triple the funding, which the government plans to do, you don't really have people to absorb it. I mean, you get 10,000 researches...
If you don't have students to work with you, you cannot do everything. The way to do it is that you should actually generate and let the experts stay here. The problem is they don't have places to go.
And we only have around 1 per 12,000 researcher density in the country. That's very far from Singapore. It's one out of 164. Okay?
But you know, Singapore is smaller than Manila. But Thailand is a nice number to look at. Thailand has one fourth of what we have. Indonesia, which is a very large population, has one half of what we have.
And Vietnam as well. The situation right now where we're in is that we don't have the interest. We don't have any program for developing our... the rural area through industrialized area. Agricultural modernization is not even a big idea that is working in the agricultural department.
Earlier they were talking about the sugar shortage and the solution was to import. Not to develop our sugar production but to import. Always to import. Now, the reason was given is that they have to fill the need immediately, but that was the same thing that they were saying a few years ago.
So, lagi nalang crisis ang crisis yung kinaharap niya. And that's the same thing for a lot of areas. The research and development is not really integrated in the thinking of our policymakers and even of industry.
If you ask industry... do you have any thing to make? Do you have any research and development in your company? They would say, no, we have very little.
In fact, the Federation of Filipino Industries says that they actually have little or none research and development in the country. But those problems of... Sewage, transportation, etc. can be actually solved by research and technology, but not just research and technology, but by better policy.