Category: Philippines Daily Inquirer

An international organization monitoring the situation of non-Moro indigenous peoples (NMIPs) in the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM), has condemned the recent attack against a Teduray elder in Maguindanao del Sur and called for greater protection for the minority tribe.

The Climate Conflict Action (CCA) said in a statement on Friday that since 2019, Rommel Lupos was the 102nd non-Moro indigenous person killed in BARMM.

Lupos was beheaded by still unidentified men on Sept. 30, the eve of observance of Indigenous Peoples Month this October. According to the Timuay Justice and Governance, the indigenous political structure of the tribe, the suspects in the brutality are likely those who had warned Lupos to vacate from his farm as they wanted to occupy the land.

‘Each killing is a reminder that promises of protection remain empty, and justice remains out of reach,’ the CCA said.

It asserted that ‘without justice, there is no protection.’

CCA said the BARMM Indigenous Peoples Code has failed to protect those it claims to defend, and neither has the entire security infrastructure of the government nor the leaders and custodians of the BARMM government.

The group re-echoed the sentiments of the non-Moro indigenous youth who said: ‘This violence is not random-it is systemic.’

The CCA said the killings were designed to sow fear, drive the Teduray away from their ancestral lands, erase their identity, and elicit another round of revenge killings.

‘We need results beyond mere statements. We need accountability. The government must deliver justice for NMIPs. They need concrete actions and policies that will make them feel more secure in their everyday life – to be able to farm their lands, to go to school without fear, and work towards a bright future for their families and generations to come,’ the CCA pointed out.

Republic Act No. 12288 or the Career Progression System for Public School Teachers and School Leaders Act-This law, signed by President Marcos on Sept. 12, 2025, establishes a competency-based promotion system for elementary and secondary teachers. It ensures their professional development and career growth by expanding the promotion tracks from Teacher I to Master Teacher I under a system that prioritizes qualifications and competence over seniority.

The Kabalikat sa Pagtuturo Act (Republic Act No. 11997)-Signed by President Marcos on June 3, 2024, the law takes its title from the Senate version of the measure (Senate Bill No. 1964), and sets an initial allowance of P5,000 per teacher for school year 2024 to 2025, followed by P10,000 starting school year 2025 to 2026 and every year thereafter.

Excellence in Teacher Education Act (Republic Act No. 11713)-This law, signed by former President Rodrigo Duterte in April 27, 2022, strengthens pre-service teacher education by broadening the mandate and functions of the Teacher Education Council (TEC) chaired by the Secretary of Education.

List of bills recently filed in Congress for teachers:

House Bill No. 4531-Filed on Sept. 11, 2025, by House Assistant Minority Leader and Eastern Samar Rep. Christopher Sheen Gonzales and House Minority Leader and 4Ps party-list Rep. Marcelino C. Libanan, the bill seeks to triple the World Teachers’ Day Incentive Benefit (WTDIB) from P1,000 to P3,000 for every public school teacher.

House Bill No. 2801-Filed on Aug. 4, 2025, by Bohol District Rep. Vanessa Aumentado, this bill proposes to upgrade the basic salary of public school teachers from Salary Grade 11 to Salary Grade 15.

Senate Bill No. 211-Filed on July 14, 2025 by Sen. Risa Hontiveros, it seeks to grant a P15,000 salary increase for all public school teachers and personnel.

Senate Bill No. 410-Filed on July 9, 2025 by Sen. Bong Go, the measure aims to provide an across-the-board monthly allowance for all teaching and non-teaching personnel engaged in basic education.

House Bill No. 203-Filed on June 30 by ACT Teachers Rep. Antonio Tinio and Kabataan Rep. Renee Louise M. Co, this bill seeks to raise the minimum monthly salary of public school teachers to P50,000. -INQUIRER RESEARCH

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert insisted she remained the right person to lead the league on Friday as she responded to an avalanche of recent criticism from leading players over her stewardship of the sport.

Engelbert, speaking ahead of Friday’s opening game of the WNBA Finals in Las Vegas, has been in the crosshairs this week after Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier accused her of ‘negligent’ governance of the WNBA. A slew of players have since spoken out in support of Collier, who said the WNBA suffered from the ‘worst leadership in the world’ and detailed a range of grievances from inconsistent officiating and failure to take players seriously.

Collier also alleged Engelbert had been dismissive of criticisms by Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark and a new generation of players who had boosted interest in the sport, saying they should be ‘on their knees’ in gratitude for the commercial opportunities they had received.

Asked directly about those remarks on Friday, Engelbert initially declined to be drawn before later denying she had used that phrase.

‘There’s a lot of inaccuracy out there through social media and all this reporting,’ Engelbert told a press conference. ‘I have been in touch with Napheesa. We’ve exchanged texts, we’re talking next week . obviously a lot of reporting, lot of inaccuracy about what I did or didn’t say, so I’ll leave it there. ‘I’m just obviously disheartened. I’m a human too. I have a family. I have two kids who are devastated by these comments. It’s obviously been a tough week.’

However when asked later whether she felt players like Clark should be ‘grateful’ for off-court earning opportunities, Engelbert replied: ‘Obviously I did not make those comments. Caitlin has been a transformational player in this league.

‘She’s been a great representative of the game. She’s brought in tens of millions of new fans to the game . as I said, there’s a lot of inaccuracies reported out there, and I certainly did not say that.’

‘Never been a quitter’

In her season-ending exit interview on Tuesday, Collier said the WNBA leadership had failed to get a grip on officiating errors accusing the league of ‘self-sabotage’.

WNBA players are also in the midst of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement and have called for a greater share of the revenues being brought into the sport, which has enjoyed a boom in recent seasons driven in large part by Clark’s arrival in the league. ‘I was disheartened to hear that some players feel the league, and me personally, do not care about them or listen to them,’ Engelbert said in her opening remarks. ‘If the players don’t feel appreciated and valued by the league then we have to do better and I have to do better.’

Engelbert said the WNBA’s competition committee would meet at the end of the season to evaluate the state of the game, including game rules, officiating and player safety.

She also said players would be invited to contribute to the establishment of a ‘multi-stakeholder task force’ which would address the issues raised by Collier and other players including the failure to tackle rough play.

‘I think it’s pretty clear that we’re misaligned on what our stakeholders want from officiating,’ Engelbert said. ‘We have heard loud and clear that we have not lived up to that needed alignment and that attention and change is needed to serve the WNBA to the level of excellence that is not currently being met. ‘We will take a hard look at what the proper line should be for good, aggressive play that we recognise has evolved into rough play.’

Engelbert also said the league wants to ‘significantly increase’ the salary and benefits given to players while also ensuring the ‘long-term growth and viability’ of the WNBA.

Engelbert also insisted she was the right person to lead the league.

Policy experts from the University of the Philippines (UP) are urging Congress to strip the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) of its disaster risk reduction (DRR) functions, citing the allegations of massive corruption hounding the agency.

In a policy note released on Friday, the UP National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG) called on lawmakers to ‘review the mandate of the DPWH, rightsize its operations, and transfer its DRR functions to a dedicated agency, such as the proposed Department of Water Resources, identified as a priority legislation by the President.’

‘The data presents an undeniable case: the DPWH bears a massive responsibility for disaster risk reduction, but it is constrained by a legacy structure that is not only insensitive to natural hazards, but also susceptible to corruption,’ they said. The DPWH is currently facing heightened scrutiny over anomalous public works projects that are either substandard or declared finished only on paper, their budgets milked for kickbacks under a scheme among its officials, private contractors, and lawmakers who maneuvered to have the projects funded.

An NCPAG analysis of the DPWH budget from 2023 to 2025 showed that the agency’s DRR-related allocations have consistently amounted to 70 percent to 80 percent of its total budget.

Roads as ‘flood interventions’

This, they said, included not only funding for the official flood management program but also its budget for roads, bridges, evacuation sites and operation centers.

The current budget framework for the DPWH has kept these different programs in different silos, the NCPAG said, thus ‘breeding inefficiencies and potential redundancies in implementation that ultimately weakens (our) long-term resilience.’

The experts took particular issue with the DPWH budget for road infrastructure, which they found to be the ‘single largest line item for flood mitigation (which) is not officially counted as such.’

A special provision in the General Appropriations Act (GAA) stipulates that all road projects must provide adequate drainage systems and must take into consideration the increase in the volume of rainfall-‘practically classifying all road projects as flood mitigation interventions,’ they noted.

In 2025, funding for the construction, repair and rehabilitation of roads reached P541.98 billion, or half of the DPWH’s entire 2011 budget and more than double the budget of the combined official and nonofficial flood control programs in 2024.

‘This means that DPWH has, for decades, executed the largest flood control projects in the country through its road programs. Unfortunately, this correlation is rarely looked into, if not, glossed over entirely in fiscal reporting and project monitoring and evaluation,’ the NCPAG said.

‘We’re kept in the dark’

Moreover, road projects ‘are not primarily evaluated on their flood control performance despite the presence of flood-specific guidelines and standards, making it extremely difficult to hold anyone accountable when drainage components do fail,’ they added.

The same goes for bridges, which are mandated by law to incorporate seismic standards and a core component of the government’s effort to reduce the impact of natural hazards.

But like flood control projects, funding for bridges are now spread across three programs: the official DPWH bridge program, the Convergence and Special Support Program, and foreign-assisted projects.

Evacuation centers

‘The resulting phenomenon is where we were kept in the dark. The DRR and climate change adaptation dimension of roads and bridges are obscured and concealed under generic headings of ‘roads’ and ‘bridges,’ misleading us into thinking that roads, bridges, and DRR-related projects are mutually exclusive priorities,’ they said.

‘Since roads and bridges are assessed mainly in terms of connectivity and mobility rather than on their resilience to disasters and climate change factors as should be intended, it understates the scale of actual government spending on disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, skewing accountability,’ the NCPAG added.

Apart from hard infrastructure, the DPWH is also involved in the construction of evacuation centers and DRRM operations centers, which ‘has grown quickly’ under President Marcos’ term, they said.

In the 2025 national budget, the DPWH listed 1,869 evacuation centers and 158 operations centers with funding of P3.04 billion and P245 million, respectively. That translates to an average of about P3 million per evacuation center and P2.5 million per operations center.

Over the three-year period from 2023 to 2025, the agency earmarked a total of P7.7 billion for 2,535 evacuation centers and P423 million for 168 operations centers.

But while the number of projects for 2025 surged, the total budget of P3.28 billion did not rise proportionally. This suggests that the agency may be building smaller, lower-cost facilities-or ‘it could point to something else entirely,’ the NCPAG authors said.

Despite all this, they noted little improvement in disaster resilience, citing persistent flooding and high levels of infrastructure damage in provinces, such as Albay, Oriental Mindoro, Ilocos Norte and Cagayan-all areas that already host hundreds of flood control projects.

‘As the agency that has been receiving the highest funding for DRR in the past years, its investments in infrastructure are certainly suspect and wanting. Its flood control projects alone are supposed to abate damage, but with many of these projects being substandard, if existing at all, it is no wonder that the impact of flooding to communities remains high,’ they said.

Repeated pattern

In Albay alone, there been P16.2 billion spent on 273 flood control projects there since 2018. ‘Yet even with this investment, the province lost as much P7.3 billion in infrastructure damage across a six-year period (2017-2023), the highest in the country,’ the NCPAG noted.

This pattern, they added, ‘repeats across the entirety of the Philippines. Oriental Mindoro’s allotment of P11.3 billion across 138 flood control projects failed to avert P4.1-billion infrastructure-specific damage; not counting other losses in agriculture, human lives, and livelihood.’

That being said, they argued that the DPWH ‘cannot perform its DRR functions if it continues to be hampered by legacy structures that are not risk-sensitive and highly susceptible to corruption.’ The NCPAG policy note was authored by a group composed of Kristoffer Berse, Kim Robert de Leon, Micah Paula Milante, Francis Miguel Garcia, Mape Estellena, Olivia Bondad, Ramon Caballero, Maria Hontanosas, Eugene Beltran, Ajay Caingat, Leila Alejandria, John Coby Cabuhat, Thea Panares and Magjorie Avila.

The Philippines remains a rice-deficit country, importing 15-30% of its annual needs.

This dependency undermines sovereignty. No nation can claim autonomy if it cannot feed its people.

Rice, central to Filipino culture and nutrition, accounts for 45-70% of daily calorie intake. Yet, current production of 12.86 million metric tons (20.4 Mt unmilled) falls short of the 15 million Mt (24.0 Metric ton) demand. The main threat: depressed farm gate prices are pushing farmers to abandon rice cultivation.

Climate change worsens this crisis. Droughts, floods, and typhoons have disrupted rice yields globally and locally. This year 2025 alone, four typhoons struck during the early harvest schedule causing a 150,000 Mt loss, with El Niño adding 600,000 Mt more-totaling a 750,000 Mt loss. Oil prices at $95-$105/barrel have driven up fertilizer costs.

Producing ,packaging, transporting and distributing 1 kg of nitrogen requires 2.15 liters of diesel oil equivalent (LDOE). A ton of palay needs 18-20 kg of nitrogen, translating to 215 LDOE.

Fertilizer contributes 50-60% of yield. Farmers are cutting usage due to cost, and very low price of palay risking a 25-30% drop in output-up to 4.8 million tons lost across 4 million hectares harvest.

Rice importation is a stop-gap measure. In 2025, the Philippines imported 4.7 million Mt .

If China imports heavily, regional prices will surge. Domestic consumption estimates-119 kg per capita-must be refined. With 11 million Filipinos abroad and 7-10 million consuming corn, actual demand may be overstated. Our revised estimate: 100-110 kg per capita.

To achieve self-sufficiency, yields must increase from 4.0 to 5.5 tons/ha. Irrigated areas average 4.3 tons/ha; rain-fed areas, only 3.0.

With improved seeds and training, 8 tons/ha is possible-but soil health, water access, and input costs must be addressed.

Meeting the rice needs of 110 million Filipinos requires 24million tons of unmilled rice and 100 billion tons of water. Irrigating 500,000 ha would cost ?500 billion.

Land conversion worsens the crisis. About 500,000 ha of prime irrigated land have been lost to urban expansion equivalent to the 500,000 ha needed to be irrigated.

Watershed degradation has weakened irrigation systems. Retail rice prices range from ?35-?60/kg, while palay prices have plunged to ?8-?13/kg-far below the ?18-?22/kg break-even cost.

This disparity deepens farmer debt and reduces yields. The income loss exceeds ?250 billion-four times the damage from Super Typhoon Yolanda.

This is not just market failure; it’s a policy-induced disaster rooted in the Rice Tariffication Law (RTL), which dismantled NFA’s market powers and exposed farmers to global shocks without safeguards.

What must be done? Guarantee a farmgate price of ?25-?28/kg to reflect rising input costs. Revisit agrarian reform-why was the 10 million ha target halved? Land ownership incentivizes soil fertility investment.

Provide seed and equipment support for diversified agriculture. Farmers must relearn propagation of bahay-kubo species and redesign farms for ecological resilience.

Promote agroecology and household agriculture. Idle spaces abound, and our climate is generous.

We must also diversify carbohydrate sources. Mix rice with 30% white corn-we produce 7 million MT of corn, mostly yellow. A shift to white corn in irrigated lowlands could triple service areas.

Promote brown rice and increase vegetable intake. Filipinos consume only 40 kg per capita, far below the recommended 120 kg. The Chinese eat 225 kg.

Vegetables offer vital nutrients, fiber, and carbohydrates. Mixing 50% brown rice with well-milled rice can reduce consumption by 30-40%. Rice is more than food. It is sovereignty, livelihood, and climate resilience. We must act now.

With the Sept. 30 earthquake that rocked the province, derailing the activities of the 2025 Miss Asia Pacific International pageant, the organizers were able to squeeze in a quick tour for the delegates.

After four straight days of taking part in various relief missions to help those severely impacted by the tremor, the ladies were finally able to get a much-needed day to unwind.

On Sunday morning, Oct. 5, the ladies participated in a personality development workshop with Trainstation, then headed out to the city to let their hair down.

They went to Mactan Newtown in Lapu-Lapu City to have lunch at two dining outlets of famed British chef Gordon Ramsay that recently opened in Cebu.

After having their fill of Ramsay’s signature Fish and Chips, Classic Cheeseburger, and Gordon’s Fried Chicken, the ladies then stopped by the Lapu-Lapu Monument just a few meters away.

Next in their itinerary was Magellan’s Cross, one of the most popular tourist sites in Cebu City, located at the Plaza Sugbo adjacent to the Basilica del Santo Niño compound.

Before the magnitude-6.9 earthquake halted the pageant’s benefit gala night on Tuesday, Sept. 30, the ladies were really scheduled for a tour of the province in the succeeding days.

But the organizers realigned the pageant’s events to respond to the most pressing concern of the host province, and instead held relief missions and other activities. On Oct. 1 and 2, the ladies went to the Cebu Province Warehouse to help with the packing of goods for distribution to those hit hardest by the quake.

Also on Oct. 2, the delegates underwent a mental health workshop to help them process their emotions after the tremor, and to prepare them for a visit to the quake-hit towns in northern Cebu.

On Oct. 3, the pageant brought relief goods to Daanbantayan, Medellin and San Remigio, neighboring towns of Bogo City, where the earthquake’s epicenter was traced.

The following day, they kicked off the earthquake relief program of the pageant’s official shoe provider, dubbed ‘From Glamour to Giving.’

Public school teachers are now considered more empowered in expressing their demands to the government, especially with regards to their decades-old call for higher compensation.

‘We are tied to the P50 pay per day from 2024 to 2027 under the law,’ said Vladimer Quetua, chairperson of the Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT). ‘If we will follow this law, while prices of goods and services are skyrocketing, we were hoping for some sort of an upgrade.’

Inadequate wages

On Oct. 3, as part of the observance of World Teachers’ Day, teachers across Metro Manila staged a mass walkout again to underscore the longtime challenges of their profession-inadequate wages, shortage of learning facilities and materials, and an education budget yet to meet the standards set by the United Nations.

The mass action also doubled as an expression of outrage over the systemic corruption being uncovered lately in public works projects.

Quetua said the clamor continues for teachers to be granted an entry-level salary of P50,000, much more than current P30,000.

Pending bills

He said there is a pending bill at the House of Representatives-House Bill No. 203-which pushes for the P50,000 minimum.

Another pending bill, House Bill No. 2903, seeks an across-the-board pay increase of P15,000, he added. In response to the calls made by the teachers who took part in Friday’s mass walkout, the Department of Education (DepEd) on Saturday said it continues to acknowledge their right to peaceful assembly and the significance of the issues being raised.

‘We likewise acknowledge that under the leadership of President Marcos, the government continues to champion the welfare of public servants-including our teachers-through reforms like Executive Order No. 64, which, last year, delivered a significant and much-needed boost to educators’ wages,’ said Dennis Legaspi, chief media relations officer of DepEd.

Legaspi was referring to the updated salary schedule that was applied to all civilian government personnel in all branches of the government.

The DepEd has been holding dialogues with all teacher representatives to address the concerns in a collaborative manner. ‘Rest assured, the DepEd leadership is not only listening but is committed to taking meaningful action,’ Legaspi said.

Go past ‘lip service’

For Quetua, however, the agency should now match its reassuring statements with concrete steps. ‘We welcome their cknowledgment, but this would just be another lip service from the government. What we want are actions from the Department of Education,’ he said.

‘Piles of cash are being wasted in the hands of corrupt officials while teachers are being burdened by the low wages (and) struggle with the rising prices of commodities,’ Quetua said. ‘From the mass walkout, we saw how the teachers are now more motivated and empowered to express the longtime demand,’ he noted.

The Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) on Sunday issued a cease and desist order to a business process outsourcing (BPO) company in Cebu for lacking disaster response plans during natural calamities.

According to Dole, the BPO had ‘no emergency and disaster preparedness and response plan in its occupational safety and health (OSH) program.’

The government agency also urged the said company to utilize flexible working arrangements. On October 2, representatives of the BPO Industry Employees Network (BIEN) filed a complaint against 30 BPO companies for allegedly violating labor and occupational safety laws during the earthquake that hit Cebu on September 30.

According to BIEN-Cebu, employees were reported to have been forced back to their offices after the magnitude 6.9 earthquake that left over 70 individuals dead and over 100 injured.

BIEN also reported that emergency exits in some Cebu offices were reportedly blocked. Additionally, some employees reported being offered double pay to continue working after the earthquake, while others were ordered to resume work right after the earthquake, with some alleging they were asked to return to work 30 minutes after the disaster hit.

Reports of verbal threats and downplaying of workers’ concerns were also made, and some employees who went home after the earthquake were marked as unpaid, lost attendance bonuses, and were suspended from work.

Furthermore, some employees were purportedly coerced into signing memos promising not to speak about the situation on social media.

BIEN-Cebu, in their complaint, asked Dole to investigate the allegations and hold the respective employers accountable for violation of the Occupational Safety and Health Standards law.

Health Secretary Teodoro Herbosa on Sunday said the Department of Health (DOH) was already investigating anomalies surrounding 400 ‘idle’ health centers under the agency even ‘before the media picked it up.’

In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Herbosa responded to an online interview of Health Assistant Secretary and spokesperson Dr. Albert Domingo.

‘Actually the DOH has been investigating these anomalies way before media picked it up,’ Herbosa said.

‘Several actions have been taken already and we continue to do case buildup,’ Herbosa added.

During the committee-level hearing for the DOH’s proposed budget for 2026, Herbosa tagged the agency’s health facilities enhancement program (HFEP) as the ‘flood control version’ of the agency.

The HFEP, launched in 2008, is DOH’s banner program that aims to ensure that poor and marginalized communities have access to healthcare services. With this revelation, Akbayan Party-list Rep. Chel Diokno, during the House plenary debates of the agency’s proposed budget, questioned why only 200 out of 600 health centers under the HFEP are functional despite being allocated over P170 billion in the past decade.

However, budget sponsor and Bataan 2nd District Rep. Albert Garcia clarified that while the HFEP has no ‘ghost hospitals,’ the lack of personnel and healthcare professionals to run the facilities made them non-functioning.

Garcia also said that the DOH entered into a memorandum of agreement with local governments in ‘good faith,’ as it expected them to provide personnel.

Herbosa also shared that the agency is ‘looking for options to operationalize non-functioning completed health facilities.’ Meanwhile, when asked what kind of actions the agency had already taken in relation to the investigation, Domingo said ‘they are actions meant for mandated investigative bodies and the formal Courts of law.’

Despite the region’s rugged mountain terrain and limited signal coverage, most Cordillera residents now own smartphones, which they use not only for communication and entertainment but increasingly for education and livelihood, according to the latest National ICT Household Survey.

In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, 61.9 percent of Cordillera households used smartphones. That figure rose sharply to 89.1 percent in 2024, said Aldrin Federico Bahit Jr., Cordillera chief statistician at the Philippine Statistics Authority.

‘Smartphones have become part of a household’s livelihood in the highlands, not just another device for watching Netflix or uploading videos to Instagram or TikTok,’ Bahit said during the Sept. 25 presentation of the survey. While 98.7 percent of Cordillera internet users in 2024 accessed social media-up from 94.6 percent in 2019-and 90.1 percent used the internet to download entertainment (up from 33.8 percent), the survey also noted that more residents were using the internet for productive purposes. The percentage of users relying on the internet for school-related research grew from 46.3 percent in 2019 to 57.7 percent in 2024. Use of the internet for work increased slightly from 29.5 to 30.5 percent, and usage for business or trade also grew from 29.5 percent to 30.5 percent over the same period.

The 2020 national census recorded Cordillera household internet access at 62.8 percent, largely due to inconsistent telecommunications signals in remote areas of Ifugao, Apayao, Abra, Kalinga, Benguet and Mountain Province.

Budget reallocation

However, improvements under the National Broadband Plan have helped increase coverage. Fiber-optic cables have now reached urban centers like Baguio City, where residents have reliable Wi-Fi access.

The rest of the region may soon benefit from broadband redistributed via wireless signals to meet the Department of Information and Communications Technology’s (DICT)five-year goal of region-wide coverage.

DICT Cordillera Director Jimmicio Daoaten said the agency may benefit from over P200 billion reallocated from flood control projects removed from the proposed 2026 General Appropriations Act, which could support continued expansion of free Wi-Fi sites across the region.

‘Our five-year target is to expand Cordillera internet access to all provinces,’ Daoaten said. One of the most notable findings of the 2024 survey was that 24.6 percent of internet users in Cordillera now sell goods online to earn a living.

According to Adamae Joy Simeon-Estong, senior trade development specialist of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI)-Cordillera, ‘clothing, footwear, sporting goods and accessories’ were the most frequently bought and sold items online, followed by cosmetics and consumer electronics.

Simeon-Estong noted that e-commerce is growing rapidly and is expected to reach a gross merchandise value of $150 billion by 2030. She said the DTI may step in to help increase the online visibility of entrepreneurs in the upland provinces.

Although this was not part of the 2024 ICT survey, Bahit had earlier cited in a different forum a 2022 report from the 49th Annual Survey of Philippine Business and Industry that found home-based businesses and small enterprises earned P355 million after reopening online during the pandemic in 2020.

This trend may help explain the widespread adoption of smartphones and other internet-capable devices in the region.

In-person shopping

However, the survey also revealed continued reluctance to adopt electronic payment methods. Most respondents still preferred cash-on-delivery for online transactions, citing security concerns. In fact, 59.1 percent said they avoided e-payments due to fear of fraud or data breaches.

Interestingly, the number of Cordillerans who preferred to shop in-person rather than online rose sharply, from 38.9 percent in 2019 to 80 percent in 2024.