Our compatriots from Southeast Asia, fellow public servants, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
It cannot escape from my mind that we are meeting today in this modern building built on land that used to be part of the sea. As a small boy growing up in this city, I used to look out to this place, and there was nothing but a vast expanse of sky and water. Then slowly, we saw land and then the buildings started shooting up, and here we are now, hosting our compatriots from Southeast Asia, in this modern convention center built on reclaimed land, in a meeting that may well define where this city will proceed from here.
Across the city, as you must have seen, buildings are rising everywhere, changing not only our landscape but our skyline as well. You are witnessing what may well be the fastest period of growth in our city, one that will forever change not just our physical lay-out but, in fact, our way of life.
In what could also be an unprecedented development, we are now seeing growth that is not fueled by agriculture alone, as we used to but, more significantly now, by a highly skilled human resource. In just over 10 years since we started campaigning for call centers to locate here, there are now over 30 of them here, employing some 30,000 of our young people.
Some years back, a survey by the magazine MoneySense voted us the “Best Place to Live in the Philippines. “ The Commission on Information and Communications Technology said Bacolod was one of the top three Next Wave Cities of the country. Eventually, it was elevated as one of the 4 “Centers of Excellence for Informational Technology and Business Processing Management Operations.”
Likewise, our efforts had been encouraged by studies such as The Philippine Cities Competitive Ranking Project undertaken by the Asian Institute of Management which concluded that Bacolod was one of the “Most Competitive Cities of the Philippines”.
On top of all these, we were also once proclaimed by the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry as the “Most Business-Friendly City” in the country.
Today, with 10 delegations of ASEAN’s information officers gathered here in Bacolod, our city has the eyes of Southeast Asia upon it. We say thank you, and assure everyone we are ready to take the challenge of integration, the first order of which is to make sure our people are aware it is happening.
“Awareness,” as the theme of our meeting here goes, call on us to know the whys and wherefores as our nation integrates itself with the 9 other member nations in the Southeast Asia region. In this, Bacolod can assure you of our unrelenting participation.
Indeed, I am proud to recall that, per our Department of Foreign Affairs, Bacolod was the first city in the Philippines to seek guidance on how we can participate as the Philippines aligns its development efforts to that of the rest of Southeast Asia. In mid-2016, long before in fact we learned that Bacolod will host an ASEAN meeting, I sat down with Ambassador Hellen de la Vega at the DFA ASEAN Desk to discuss the integration of our countries and see where Bacolod stands in the new realities that are coming because of it.
I know there will be challenges as well as opportunities that the ASEAN integration will bring, and I assure everyone our people will not be left behind, not in the process of integration and certainly not in ensuring we get a fair share of the opportunities as well.
I am aware that an integrated ASEAN will demand an unprecedented level of participation from our people; the time when we waited for opportunities to come knocking on our doors is gone. We now need to go, find those opportunities and make them work for our city. Our people will rise to the challenge.
Amid the growth we are now enjoying, we realize that we cannot go it alone, that it is with the community of nations, of cities across the world that sustainable, equitable growth and development is possible.
This meeting among our Southeast Asian brothers is a step in the right direction. We realize that the way to the future is in partnerships with other nations, to meld our uniqueness with theirs, and share with the rest of the world what each of us has been blessed with.
Bacolod has plenty to share. You will find in our city, not just unique places and structures – old churches and ancestral houses, resorts and beaches, farms and factories – but most importantly, a warm and smiling people who are always ready to welcome you. In fact, in the Philippines, we are known as the City of Smiles. We smile at friends and strangers. We smile at the blessings that come our way; and we smile even bigger at the problems that befall us.
We celebrate a lot, from weekend fiestas featuring open-air dances and coronations to huge festivals like the world-acclaimed MassKara Festival, which is a festival of smiling masks.
Once again, in behalf of our people, I say welcome to our dignitaries and guests from Southeast Asia and from the rest of the world. I would always say to our visitors “Welcome to the Philippines’ City of Smiles.” But now I say – henceforth, I will say – “Welcome to Southeast Asia’s City of Smiles.”
Thank you very much. (End)