By Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza, Reporter

SECURITY experts on Wednesday criticized the paltry share of the Philippines in the United States’ $95-billion (P5.5 trillion) aid package — mostly military assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan and US partners in the Indo-Pacific region — saying Manila should demand more as it deals with China, the world’s biggest naval power.

The Philippines will get $500 million in aid under a US Senate-approved bill, compared with $61 billion for Ukraine’s efforts against Russia’s invasion and $26 billion for Israel and humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones around the world.

The Philippine share is part of the $8.12 billion allotted to “counter communist China” in the Indo-Pacific region.

“Since a conflict could spark at any time due to miscalculations or decisive escalations, aid is better than none,” said Joshua Bernard B. Espeña, vice-president at Manila-based International Development and Security Cooperation.

“However, the Philippines must negotiate for a bigger yet granulated piece of the pie if both allies are serious about building up Philippine defense,” he said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

With a 79–18 vote in the US Senate, the proposed package that President Joseph R. Biden is expected to sign this week is seen as a bipartisan victory, getting support from most Democrats and traditional Republicans wary of ultra-nationalist sentiments among their ranks.

The House passed its version of the proposed package on Saturday in the form of individual bills combined for Senate action.

“I expect that given the strong bipartisan congressional support, Manila has reasons to be optimistic in asking for these reasonable packages given the mutual security concerns posed by China,” Mr. Espeña said.

He added that the US should offer a more affordable package for the Philippines’ planned acquisition of combat aircraft under its Multirole Fighter program.

President Ferdinand R. Marcos, Jr. in February said the Philippines was on the frontline of a battle for regional peace as it faces China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea.

China claims the waterway almost in its entirety, including waters that fall within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone.

It continues to block resupply missions at Second Thomas Shoal, where Manila grounded a World War II-era ship in 1999 to assert its sovereignty, by firing water cannons at much smaller Philippine boats.

Richard J. Heydarian, a senior lecturer at the Asian Center of the University of the Philippines, said the Philippines got less 1% of the aid package while it is “bullied by the world’s largest naval power.”

“Even Jordan and Pakistan have enjoyed far more defense aid and modern weapon transfers than the Philippines,” he tweeted.

‘SELLING OUT’
The Philippines and the US have been treaty allies since 1951, when the two countries signed their Mutual Defense Treaty, which compels both sides to defend each other in case of an armed attack.

The treaty was updated last year to cover attacks on the Philippine armed forces, vessels and other assets in the South China Sea.

House Speaker Ferdinand Martin G. Romualdez said the bipartisan measure was a result of “extensive deliberations” between a Philippine delegation that he led and American legislators at Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The deliberations coincided with the recent trilateral summit among Mr. Biden, Mr. Marcos and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, he added.

“The aid package comes with strings attached and it involves the selling out of our sovereignty,” Bagong Alyansang Makabayan Secretary-General Raymond Palatino said in a Facebook Messenger chat.

He noted that the US does not pay for military bases under its 2014 Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA) with the Philippines.

Mr. Marcos has expanded the deal, giving the US access to four more sites on top of the five existing ones.

“A pitiful price tag for allowing the US to turn the country into an extension of its military network,” Mr. Palatino said. “Only corrupt officials of the Marcos government stand to benefit from this aid coming from the world’s biggest enabler of genocide and war profiteer.”

It is in Washington’s best interest to invest more in its key allies in the region, Don Mclain Gill, who teaches international relations at De La Salle University, said via Messenger chat.

“For the past two decades, China has significantly controlled the South China Sea short of [declaring] war with the US,” he said. “The Philippines is at the frontline of an emerging geopolitical transition in the world, particularly with China’s growing assertiveness and expansionist ambitions.”

Mr. Gill said US policymakers should keep in mind that Washington’s preoccupation away from the region at the start of the 21st century had set the ground for China’s expansionism, “which can critically derail not just regional, but also international security.”

Mr. Espeña urged the Marcos government to “maximize all the funds by identifying which capabilities in the Armed Forces of the Philippines needed short and long-term modernization.”

RECORD HEAT in the Philippines this month has forced schools to send children home for online classes, reviving memories of COVID lockdowns and raising fears that more extreme weather in the years to come could deepen educational inequalities.

Pupils at 7,000 public schools in the Southeast Asian country were sent home last week due to unusually hot weather in many areas that forecasters have linked to the effects of the El Niño weather phenomenon.

Teacher Erlinda Alfonso, who works at a public elementary school in Quezon City near the capital, said she did not know what was worse for her pupils — sweltering in an overcrowded classroom or trying to study at home.

“Some students told me they prefer going to school because the heat is worse at home,” she said, adding that many of her students live in nearby shantytowns and have no internet connection to take part in online classes.

While teachers are providing offline assignments to students without internet access, Ms. Alfonso said the arrangement left children with no one to raise questions with.

“If there’s something they could not understand, their parents or siblings are often not at home because they need to earn a living,” said the 47-year-old, who also heads the city’s association of public school teachers.

The Philippines had one of the world’s longest school shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which highlighted the education gap faced by children from low-income families without computers or sufficient internet access.

But with most public schools in the country of 115 million people poorly equipped to deal with soaring temperatures and other extreme weather, online classes have become the safest option during the heatwaves, teachers and unions say.

The Health department on Wednesday said it had recorded 34 cases of heat-related illness, including six deaths, from Jan. 1 to Apr. 18.

These were from central Visayas, the Ilocos region in the country’s north and the Soccsksargen region in the southern Philippines.

The state weather bureau expected 30 areas in the country to experience scorching temperatures of up to 46C on Wednesday.

‘UNBEARABLE’

In public schools in Metro Manila, the capital region, a survey of more than 8,000 teachers last month showed 87% of students had suffered from heat-related conditions.

More than three-quarters of teachers described the heat as “unbearable” in the survey conducted by the Alliance of Concerned Teachers of the Philippines — National Capital Region (ACT-NCR), a teaching association.

Nearly half or 46% of teachers said classrooms have only one or two electric fans, highlighting inadequate ventilation measures to deal with rising temperatures. “The heat had tremendous impact on children. Some students even col-lapsed inside classrooms. Teachers suffered from the heat, too, but often they would prioritize their students’ health inside classrooms,” Ruby Bernardo, spokesperson of ACT-NCR, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

As climate change fuels the frequency and severity of heatwaves, the problems faced by teachers and students in the Philippines look set to play out elsewhere.

About 243 million children in Asia and the Pacific are expected to be exposed to hotter and longer heatwaves over the coming months, the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, said last week.

Children are particularly susceptible to heat stroke, and UNICEF said prolonged exposure to intense heat also affects their ability to concentrate and learn.

Since the start of El Niño, “danger category” temperatures as high as 44C have been predicted by the country’s weather agency.

Filipino teachers say more measures are needed to deal with extreme heat in schools — from tackling shortages of classrooms and teachers, which lead to overcrowding, to providing free drinking water and having a school nurse or doctor on site.

The Alliance of Concerned Teachers has called on the Department of Education (DepEd) to address such issues.

It has also proposed the immediate reversion to the pre-pandemic school calendar, when the hot months of April and May fell during the long school break.

Asked to comment, a DepEd spokesperson said its policy of letting head teachers decide when to switch to online or offline home classes “provides a more immediate and effective response to heat conditions rather than knee-jerk changes that would further compromise learning recovery.”

Some teachers say the situation also underlines the need for more education about climate change.

“Climate change has not been comprehensively taught in our classrooms. But it’s a pressing issue linked to all the other challenges our education system is facing now,” Ms. Bernardo said.

For many low-paid public sector teachers, working in packed schools with nonexistent or inadequate cooling has been the last straw.

“The heat makes me want to resign or retire early,” Ms. Alfonso said. — Thomson Reuters Foundation with Kyle Aristophere T. Atienza