Not a case of ‘revenge travels’

For the past two days, the Presidential Communications Office (PCO) trumpeted about the gains from the foreign trips embarked on by President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. (PBBM). The PCO first reported PBBM’s 11 foreign trips for this year alone brought about P4 trillion worth of total new investments to the Philippines.

Obviously though, the bulk of these reported foreign investments are still in “pledges” yet. “Pledges,” in the sense these are just signed commitments entered into either in the form of memorandum of understanding (MOU), or in memorandum of agreement (MOA).

Quoting the report of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), investments that already have a signed agreement were valued at P544.152 billion; and those with a signed MOU of letter of intent (LOI) were valued at P1.588 trillion. Finally, those confirmed but not covered by MOUs/LOIs and still in the planning stage are pegged at P1.522 trillion.

The PCO issued another press statement that sought to highlight the creation of more than 200,000 job opportunities from the P294 billion worth of actualized investments. The estimated P4 trillion investments represented 148 projects as monitored by the DTI as of Dec. 21, the PCO explained.

Actually, PBBM has undertaken a total of 19 overseas trips since assuming office in June last year. Many of these trips are obligatory state visits, especially with our neighbors and fellow member-states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as the “must attend” international events like the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders’ Summit.

The other overseas travels are classified as “official” visits like the two “official visits” to the United States (US) of PBBM. The first was in New York for the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in October last year. It was there PBBM had his first four-eyes meeting at the sidelines with US President Joe Biden. The second trip to the US was in May 2023 when PBBM finally had official meeting with President Biden at the White House.

PBBM flew again to America just last month to attend the APEC Leaders’ Summit hosted by the US held in San Francisco, California. After which he flew