15/04/2026
Amidst crisis and national government incompetence,
𝗡𝗼𝘄 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝗕𝗮𝗴𝘂𝗶𝗼
Over a month into the oil crisis, there is still no clear end to the US and Israel’s aggression against Iran and its rippling effects on global oil markets. The conflict has triggered a global surge in fuel prices, with the Philippines among the hardest-hit nations.
Worse, the Marcos Jr. regime's response to the oil crisis has been marked by denial, delay, and inadequacy. As the burden shifts downward, it is again the drivers, workers, commuters, vendors, and communities who are left to absorb the shock.
𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐝𝐚𝐩𝐭
In the absence of a coherent national response, the burden of managing the crisis has fallen on local government units, and communities. Local government units across the country are now independently crafting stopgap measures and forced to blindly navigate this crisis.
The continuing oil crisis has already disrupted Baguio's local economy across multiple fronts simultaneously: transportation, utilities, livelihoods, and food security. The city's deep dependence on supply chains, tourist visits, and commuter mobility makes it particularly exposed to fuel-driven disruptions.
Basic commodities, especially food products, are experiencing supply chain issues as suppliers reduce delivery runs to cut fuel costs. Products coming from outside the province face creeping price increases, Benguet farmers are left choosing between disposing produce, spoiled harvests, or selling at a loss.
Utility providers, including water and electricity services, are assessing further rate increases citing fuel-dependent operational costs, compounding pressure on households already facing higher transport fares and food prices.
The transportation situation is where the strain is most visible day-to-day. Over the past weeks, jeepneys have sharply reduced the number of units in service, leaving long queues of stranded passengers. At the barangay level, local officials are brokering voluntary fare arrangements between jeepney associations and commuters, a stopgap negotiated on the street, not in policy. Taxi drivers, meanwhile, are requesting voluntary additional fare from passengers just to break even.
All of this unfolds against the reality that wages have been chronically low and never meaningfully adjusted to reflect actual cost of living. In the Cordillera, the regional minimum wage of ₱505 already falls dramatically short of the estimated ₱1,200 needed to sustain a family even before the crisis. The response has been limited in scope with some aid to transport workers, but no wage adjustment, no cost-of-living support, nothing for the rest of the population equally battered by the crisis. Ordinary citizens are absorbing higher costs on incomes that were already insufficient before the crisis began.
𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐤𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐰𝐞 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐩𝐨𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠
We have been here before. When COVID-19 shuttered the city to visitors in 2020, the cracks in Baguio's economic foundation became impossible to ignore. A city that had staked its livelihood so heavily on the tourism industry found itself without a safety net the moment that industry stopped. The recovery came, the numbers climbed back, and the momentum to finally do things differently was quietly set aside.
Crises are becoming more frequent, reminding us that disruptions are no longer chains of unprecedented events but an accelerating pattern that continues to expose unresolved vulnerabilities. This situation demands a serious move past crisis management and toward the structural changes we have long needed and long been asking for.
𝟭. 𝗜𝗺𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗵𝗲𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗽𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗲. Over the past weeks, the local government through the City Council have passed several resolutions in order to mitigate the effects of the oil crisis. Under the declaration of state of calamity, the city government is expected to, or rather must, mobilize available resources in aid of affected sectors and implement special measures to ensure public welfare.
In relation to this, the city government is rolling out local support programs for the jeepney drivers and operators through shouldering the cost of empty return trips of jeepneys during the night. The city government is also distributing subsidies to taxi operators and drivers.
While these are commendable steps, it only addresses some aspects of the crisis that has reached the whole of the population. There are still some sectors in dire need of immediate relief.
Targeted relief, although helpful in short-run, is not enough when the need is systemic. Thus, the response needs to match the scale of the problem. In this light, passing a city council resolution urging the regional wage board to review the minimum wage in the cordillera is a positive step towards the call for a national living wage.
𝟮. 𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗹𝗼𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗲𝘀. To understand why each successive crisis hits Baguio so hard, we have to look not just at the conditions on the ground but at the decisions made over decades about what the city is being built for and who it is being built to serve.
Corporate-sponsored development has been actively invited into the city. Condominium developments and business-oriented projects that cater to massive tourist arrivals have proliferated. Public-private partnership arrangements continue to be the main modality at which public services and infrastructure in the city are being developed.
All of these should warrant serious review in light of how they serve, or fail to serve, the broader public interest. Corporations are more concerned with their profit margins than public welfare, and this reality has shaped what gets built and for whom.
For one, an observable reduction of heavy traffic due to, primarily, decrease in private cars roaming inside the city is a signal to a path in resolving urban mobility. Instead of building multiple private parking structures inside the city, the local government must further invest in public transport through developing transport terminals, staging areas, and road prioritization of public utility vehicles without handing it over to large corporations. Make it way easier to travel in and around the city though public transport. The aim is to further promote and incentivize the use of public transportation, instead of heavily regulating private car use.
𝟯. 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗼𝗻 𝗻𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗶𝘀𝘀𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘀. The oil crisis gripping the Philippines, it must be said clearly, is not a natural disaster or a neutral market event. It is the direct and foreseeable consequence of geopolitical conflict compounded by anti-people and corporate-friendly policies — among them the Oil Deregulation Law and existing tax structures — that have left ordinary Filipinos with no buffer against global fuel price movements.
The administration has shown no willingness to pursue structural reforms. There is no move to scrap, or even review, the Oil Deregulation Law, which stripped the government of its capacity to regulate oil prices and placed pricing power entirely in the hands of private oil corporations. There is likewise no proposal to suspend or scrap regressive taxes such as the Value Added Tax (VAT) and excise taxes on petroleum products. This taxes significantly inflate the pump prices paid by consumers and further directly affecting the prices of food, transportation, and utilities.
Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation (DoTr) and the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) including their regional offices continue to refuse to take any decisive action that would protect both drivers and commuters.
Local governments cannot fix this alone. But they can choose how aggressively they advocate for the people they serve. The Baguio local government and its people must demand, clearly and loudly, for national policy reforms. We must unite to scrap the frameworks that have made communities this vulnerable and advocate for pro-people reforms and policies.
𝐓𝐨𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲
Resilience is not what a city does in the middle of a crisis. Resilience is the condition a city is in before the crisis hits: the depth of its economic diversity, the adequacy of its social protection systems, the degree to which its residents have enough economic stability to absorb a shock without immediately falling into hardship.
We have a city that, in its current form similar in the national level, cannot insulate its people from shocks. Not from a pandemic, not from an oil crisis. From the onset of the crisis, it is the vulnerable sectors who came together in the spirit of bayanihan – community pantry, donation boxes, and voluntary fare hikes were set up for jeepney drivers.
In times of crisis, it becomes clear that corporate-oriented development cannot be the anchor of a community's economic security. The matter of how resilient we make our city is not a question of how we anticipate whether another shock is coming but whether anything will be different when it does. Baguio already has assets that a different development orientation could build on: a significant student and academic population, creative and knowledge industries, a strong highland agricultural identity.
People-centered development, namely the investment in the conditions that make the city genuinely livable, is not a luxury or an ideological preference. It is what actually makes a city capable of surviving hard times.
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