Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment
Statement
July 30, 2025
With downright repugnance and detestation, Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment expresses its concern and agitation over the recent result of the Senate committee chairmanships of the 20th Congress. The Senate continues to be a corruptive enterprise manned by political schemings of self-serving lawmakers in the face of environmental degradation and democratic decay. With the majority of Senate chairships occupied by incompetent and corrupt bureaucrat capitalist servile to the interests of landlords and comprador bourgeoisie, lawmaking persists as a hollowed out spectacle by the political gigolos of the ruling class.
In one with the struggle for environmental justice, Kalikasan condemns the assignation of Camille Villar as chair of Committee on Environment and Pia Cayetano on Energy Committee. They are unfit, incompetent, and inutile to take on the serious responsibility of responding to the current and disastrous environmental destruction and climate crisis. Their assignation is irreconcilable to their complicity and direct involvement in the State’s massive environmental plunder.
Camille Villar is publicly known to hail from the same Villars notorious for amassing wealth from their wide-scale landgrabbing and eviction for land-use conversions. Their extensive LUCs sweeping agricultural lands have been documented to harass, threaten, and illegally arrest peasants using state forces to enforce violence and intimidation. Since 2019, Manny Villar retains its name in Forbes’s global billionaire, all at the expense of displacing millions of Filipino peasants from their homes and livelihoods.
Controversies regarding the family-owned [C]rimeWater also agitated public discontent due to negligence and impunity in its dereliction to provide humane social services. With more than a hundred deals nationwide, Villar’s corporate monopoly on water resources and rent-seeking captured the government in its favor. With another Villar seizing a Senate committee chairmanship, the family’s corporate greed merging with their expanding political power is just a capital expansion clothed in public [dis]service.
Like the Villars, Pia Cayetano’s political career is built on making a family business in politics. She is the principal author of the law legalizing Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations, responsible for the recent controversies on money laundering and human trafficking. Cayetano is among the leading personalities pushing for reforms of energy policies in the legislature. Under the pretense of energy security, reforms only mean heavy privatization of the energy industry by sanctioning private corporations to exploit the country’s natural resources while carrying out wide-scale environmental destruction.
Cayetano also publicly pushed for a bigger budget on renewable energy. Another fraudulent scheme touted by the government as the country”s “green transition” to sustainable energy security. A trajectory that has warranted forest denudation, ecosystem destruction, seizure of ancestral lands, and large scale displacement of peasants and fisherfolks from their livelihoods. These are atrocities by private corporations sanctioned and coddled by the government. Cayetano also sponsored the extraction of indigenous gases, another fossil fuel extraction justified by urging immediate energy security. This is contradictory to her parroted renewables and pronouncements on green transition. Investigations on projects extracting natural gases like the Malampaya Deepwater Gas-to-Power owned by billionaire Enrique Razon have resulted in the contamination of sea water, significant damage to marine life, and health risk exposure to the communities. Pushing for destructive extractive projects for insatiable corporate greed of business predators is a blatant disregard and outright promotion of the age-long economic and political repression of the Filipino people.
The government’s touted green transition, now concurrent with the Senate transition to the 20th Congress promises nothing, but a continuous backsliding towards environmental destruction and an even more human rights violation. The likes of Villar and Cayetano, enslaved to corporate interests, continuously ransack and plunder democratic institutions. The capitalist market’s hand is no longer invisible, but it is the very bloodied hands of these politicians that readily signed the death of all lifeforms.
