By Reisha Mae F. Valdez, UC student
My grandparents used to tell me that land is the one thing you should never easily give away.
Money can be earned back. Buildings can be rebuilt. Companies can shut down and be replaced. But land is different. Once it leaves your hands, it rarely returns. And when it does, it is often no longer the same.
That is why I cannot help but feel uneasy whenever I hear grand promises attached to projects like Pax Silica.
We are told it will bring jobs. We are told it will attract investments. We are told it will place the Philippines at the center of artificial intelligence and semiconductor production. The words sound exciting. They always do. Every generation has been sold a dream of progress. The question is whether that dream belongs to us or to those who profit from it.
Because every large project comes with a simple question: Who benefits the most?
The Philippines has heard these promises before. Foreign investors arrive. Our resources are opened. Our land is transformed. Our people provide the labor. Yet years later, we are still asking why many communities remain poor while the wealth extracted from their soil has long since left their shores.
Pax Silica is being marketed as the future. Yet no future worth building should come at the expense of the people living in the present.
Environmental groups warn about the enormous demand for water and energy. Farmers worry about losing the land that feeds their families. Indigenous communities fear displacement from places they have called home for generations. These concerns are often dismissed as barriers to development, as if ordinary people should simply move aside whenever powerful interests arrive with bigger plans.
But development should improve lives, not uproot them.
What troubles me most is how easily we become impressed by size. Thousands of hectares. Millions of dollars. International partnerships. These figures sound impressive in speeches and look attractive in headlines. Yet numbers alone do not tell us who bears the cost.
A farmer does not measure life in hectares. A community does not measure life in investment pledges. They measure life through clean water, secure livelihoods, fertile soil, and the certainty that their children will still have a place to call home tomorrow.
Supporters of Pax Silica argue that it will strengthen the economy and reduce our dependence on foreign technology. I hope they are right. The Philippines deserves industries that create opportunities and prepare us for the future.
But if our role is limited to supplying land, minerals, and cheap labor while others control the technology, patents, and profits, then we are not shaping the future. We are simply supplying its raw materials.
The richest nations did not become powerful by exporting what lay beneath their soil. They became powerful by building knowledge, industries, and innovations of their own.**
