A Radical's Nut

President Marcos, as expected, hyped Pax Silica in his fifth State of the Nation Address (SONA). He claimed that the US-led initiative “will bring quality jobs to our people, accelerate our industrial competitiveness, and revitalize our economy.”

The Marcos regime wants the Filipino people to take these claims on the supposed benefits of the Pax Silica industrial hub hook, line, and sinker. To this day, the government has not properly informed the public of the specific details of this project. Exactly what kind of industrial activities will take place inside the planned Economic Security Zone (ESZ) and on what terms? We still do not know, yet Marcos is boasting about quality jobs and economic development.

What we know is that for over five decades, US semiconductor investments in the Philippines, such as Intel and Texas Instruments, have centered on backend assembly, packing, and testing. Their operations primarily relied on low-wage, high-turnover assembly-line labor and did not allow real technology transfer and domestic supply chain capabilities. As its neocolony, the US ensured that the Philippines remained trapped at the lowest end of the global value chain, dependent on imported capital equipment and raw components. 

The lack of transparency in the Pax Silica negotiations is breeding glaring contradictions within the government’s narrative. While the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) downplays the project’s impact by claiming that the ESZ covers public land affecting only a handful of farmers, on the ground, tens of thousands of local farmers and Indigenous Aetas stand to be displaced. Lacking clear, accessible details to defend these conflicting accounts, the Marcos regime instead resorts to sweeping claims during the SONA, promising economic revitalization and quality jobs to mask the reality and deceive the public about the true human cost of Pax Silica.

What we know is that the Marcos regime has committed 1,619 hectares of land for Pax Silica’s ESZ. These lands are located primarily in Capas, Tarlac, and will physically and economically dislocate farmers and the Indigenous Aeta people. The government has begun negotiations with the US without first consulting these local communities. Remember that the Aeta communities in what is now called the New Clark City, where the ESZ will be constructed, still have an unresolved petition for a Certificate of Ancestral Domain Title (CADT) covering around 18,000 hectares. It is estimated that up to 20,000 Aeta people reside within or are directly dependent on the claimed ancestral domain.

Additionally, 15,000 farmers are also said to rely on these lands. These contradict the claim of the BCDA, the lead agency overseeing the project, that the planned ESZ covers public land and that only around 10 farmers will be affected. There was no mention of these major issues in Marcos’s SONA regarding Pax Silica.

A growing number of Filipinos are also expressing fears that the data centers and other processing facilities, which will reportedly be built inside the ESZ, would aggravate the country’s already deteriorating water and power crises. The BCDA already admitted that the initial project design has a capacity of 120 million liters of water per day, while early estimates suggested that the ESZ could consume around 65 to 90 million liters daily. These estimates correspond to the daily domestic water consumption of around 600,000 to 900,000 Filipinos. The planned ESZ would consume water equivalent to the average household consumption of nine to 14 municipalities in Tarlac combined. For farming irrigation, the ESZ’s estimated water consumption could irrigate 500 to 900 hectares of rice fields during a 100-day planting season. Note that until today, up to 40 million Filipinos still do not have access to clean and potable water. Meanwhile, around 1.3 million hectares of irrigable land in the country remain unirrigated, affecting an estimated 800,000 to one million smallholder farmers. Again, there was no mention of these urgent issues in Marcos’s SONA about Pax Silica.

The BCDA claims that the ESZ will not rely on community water supplies but will utilize rainwater harvesting, storage, treatment, and recycling systems to meet its water requirements. However, a massive consumption of 65 to 90 million liters of water per day, based on estimates, would require a dedicated, continuous catchment area equivalent to the entire size of the ESZ. Does the BCDA plan to get another 1,600-plus hectares of land just for rain collection? Furthermore, Central Luzon experiences a severe 5- to 6-month dry season, aggravated by a worsening annual El Niño. How does the BCDA plan to supply the ESZ’s continuous water needs if it will rely on rain collection alone?

Further, the BCDA also estimated that the ESZ, at full development, would require a dedicated power source of 3,000 megawatts. That is two times the generating capacity of the country’s largest operating conventional generating plant, the GNPower Diningin in Bataan, which has an installed capacity of 1,449.93 MW. Such massive power requirements will certainly put additional pressure on the country’s already precarious energy security, with reserve margins remaining dangerously thin and regional grids vulnerable to unexpected forced plant outages, sudden spikes in heat/electricity demand, and transmission bottleneck constraints.

What we know about the Philippines’ role in Pax Silica is that it is to supply the critical minerals needed by the AI supply chains that the US wants to control. Both the BCDA and Marcos, in his SONA, claimed that the Pax Silica project will only involve processing critical minerals into higher-value products, and that it will be a hub for advanced manufacturing. What they failed to mention is that the US chose the Philippines to be part of Pax Silica because it “holds significant reserves of nickel, copper, chromite, and cobalt, minerals increasingly vital to global supply chains”. While the processing may take place inside the ESZ, Pax Silica puts tremendous pressure on the Philippines to intensify its mining activities. In fact, the US is funding initiatives to explore new mining areas for Pax Silica and its AI supply chains. It means that on top of the 1,619 hectares of the ESZ, thousands of hectares more will be plundered for critical minerals throughout the country to feed Pax Silica.

Finally, what we also know is that the current US imperialist strategy in the Philippines is to seamlessly integrate its military and economic agendas into a unified framework. Major initiatives such as Pax Silica and the Luzon Economic Corridor, of which the ESZ is a strategic component as Marcos pointed out in his SONA, are tailored not only to deepen economic plunder, resource exploitation, and profits for US financial oligarchs, but also to enhance the logistics, mobility, and operational readiness of the US military in the context of its competition with China. We know that Pax Silica’s AI supply chains can be used for both commercial and military purposes. 

The US is grabbing our land and resources through Pax Silica for its plunder and war. Marcos, of course, did not say this in his SONA.

We must therefore escalate and broaden our campaign to shut down Pax Silica. The coming weeks and months are crucial as Washington and Manila ramp up their negotiations to finalize the deal in time for Trump’s expected visit during the ASEAN Summit in November. We also expect the Pax Silica and ESZ to be the centerpiece of the inaugural Luzon Economic Corridor Investor Forum on September 10-11 in Manila. ###