Statement by Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment
On President Marcos Jr.’s midterm State of the Nation Address
July 29, 2025
Let’s not kid ourselves after listening to Marcos Jr.’s SONA. If there’s a clear message he delivered, it’s this: the regime’s main project is plunder—disguised as “renewable energy,” “critical mining,” and “infrastructure.” These are just slogans. In reality, they open our land and natural wealth even wider for exploitation under foreign multinationals, local big business, and their friends in the high office. All this talk about progress and “energy for all” is just a mask for land grabbing, displacement, and environmental destruction that the majority of Filipinos will be left to suffer.
Who gets the profit from these mega-projects? Foreign investors, old landed families, and a handful of cronies. Who pays the price? Farmers with no land, indigenous peoples driven off their ancestral domains, whole communities wiped out or militarized so companies can build dams, mines, and “green” energy installations. Marcos’s SONA is really an announcement that those with wealth and foreign passports will gobble up even more, while the masses get floods, landslides, hunger, and dispossession.
He shouts about infrastructure—roads, bridges, power plants. But whose needs do these serve? They carve up our forests, drive people off their farms, and make it easier for mining and export zones to expand under imperialist direction. The end result: our country’s natural riches are shipped abroad, and we’re left with poisoned rivers, bald mountains, and shattered communities.
And then there’s the biggest lie of all: Marcos’s “friend to all, enemy to none” line. While he says this, U.S. troops and bases under EDCA are spreading all over the archipelago, trampling our sovereignty and turning our communities into pawns and battlegrounds. These military installations bring pollution, deforestation, even more land grabbing—all so the US can strengthen its empire and the local elite can pocket their share. Who shoulders the risk, the environmental destruction, and the threat of war? Ordinary Filipinos, not the imperialists.
Let’s be crystal clear: Marcos Jr. and his regime are the number one disaster facing the Filipino people and our environment. His plunder drive, his greenwashed imperialist deals, his hand-in-glove partnership with oligarchs and foreign capital—they are fueling the very crises he claims to solve. The more he talks about “development,” the more landless, hungry, and desperate the rural and urban poor become. The more he invites foreign “friends,” the tighter their grip on our resources and future.
No PR, no phony “national pride” speeches can hide it: Marcos is the disaster, not the solution. The answer isn’t to bow down to his projects, but to fight back—defend our land, protect our people, resist imperialist plunder, and assert our right to national patrimony and genuine environmental justice.
