- Published on Tuesday, 20 November 2012 18:58
- Written by Lito U. Gagni / Market Files
‘I AM Cynthia Villar, and I say no to reclamation,” she thundered before a “People’s Summit on the Impacts of Reclamation” at the University of the Philippines last month and there is no denying this is the advocacy that will reverberate all over the archipelago in the coming months.
Villar is serving notice that urban renewal should be the new mantra—not the reclamation that threatens the flooding of thousands of homes. And here, she walks the talk. For on October 12 she took the witness stand before the courts as she tried to marshal the argument that reclamation should not be allowed in a stretch of Manila Bay as the cost and benefit do not tally. She has already won a writ of kalikasan against the project and now wants a temporary environmental protection order (Tepo) that would stop it completely.
Standing tall on her conviction that a planned 635-hectare reclamation project on Manila Bay could economically affect residents of Las Piñas, Parañaque and parts of Cavite, Villar spewed out the cold logic of the numbers. The reclamation would “flood” the economic well-being of the residents of these three cities, as the project would “impede the natural river flow in Las Piñas.”
She said Las Piñas, which has 4,000 hectares, or 40 million square meters, would not benefit from the planned reclamation that could add another 500 hectares, or 5 million square meters. The additional hectarage does not at all result in increased economic benefits and would even worsen the economic picture for the residents. The damage to flooding “massively outweighs any benefits from the additional land,” said Villar.
Doing the math, Villar said that assuming the cost of the land in Las Piñas is P5,000 per square meter, and the flooding caused by the reclamation would decrease property values by 10 percent, the P200-billion value of the land would go down by P20 billion, which far outweighs the P14 billion worth of reclaimed land. That is how skewed the cost-benefit ratio is, much like the fact that the reclamation proponent, All Tech Contractors Inc., is doing the huge project on a P50-million capital.
And what about the recurring damage? Villar vows: “We will stand firm in our stance against this reclamation, since the Constitution itself guarantees our right to a healthy environment.” What she proposes instead is urban renewal, where old buildings are rebuilt, whole blocks redesigned without any disruption to the ecological balance.
The Las Piñas-Parañaque-Cavite ecosystem is threatened by the reclamation project, as it would not only affect the flow of the Las Piñas River but even destroy the remaining 175-hectare mangrove forest and habitat that is home to bird species unique to the country. Citing an independent hydrologist, Tricore Solutions Inc., Villar is pushing for the Tepo since an “Ondoy”-like flooding would sink villages in the three affected areas by 0.15 meters and as much as 5.12 meters, equivalent to a two-story building.
Aside from this, a livelihood project that Villar conceptualized and which now employs thousands of poor folk along the banks of the Las Piñas River would be affected. What the residents do is collect the waste and water hyacinths along the river system and turn them into works of art that the Villar Foundation then markets and distributes.
Villar’s project, that of educating the Las Piñas residents to weave bags and their dreams to make their lives better, has actually caught fire in a nook along the river system in Pateros, the only remaining municipality in Metro Manila. In this town known for balut and alpombra sandals, a resident on M.R. Flores Street in Santo Rosario Kanluran wants to transplant the Villar livelihood advocacy.
This advocacy for ecological balance and aligned with it, that of providing livelihood opportunities, proves that Mrs. Villar is her own man, so to speak; in walking her talk, she is also doing an extraordinary task of weaving a new paradigm in urban renewal while providing a better future for less-fortunate folk not only in her native Las Piñas but also in 102 government reclamation projects being planned.
That is what makes this former Las Piñas congresswoman a different breed of leader.
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