by Diwa Marcelino

A nation rich in everything except justice

On April 21, in a church basement in Winnipeg, Danilo “Ka Daning” Ramos delivered a message most Canadians will never hear. As chairperson of Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), one of the Philippines’ largest farmers’ organizations, Ka Daning travelled across the Pacific Ocean to tell us a story: the Philippines is rich, but its people are poor. And Canada, he made clear, is not a bystander. It is a beneficiary.

The Philippines is rich in land, minerals, and labour. Its people are not. That contradiction is not a development failure; it is the result of a system designed to keep the country open for foreign extraction while preventing the industrialization that would let Filipinos benefit from their own resources.

Ka Daning named one consequence that captures the whole picture: according to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippines – once a rice-producing nation – is now the world’s largest importer of rice. Laws like the Rice Liberalization Law opened Philippine markets to cheaper foreign rice, wiping out local farmers who could no longer compete. The people who grow the food cannot afford to eat it.

This did not happen without the Philippine government’s approval. Ghost infrastructure projects divert billions in public funds into private hands while roads, irrigation systems, and rural services go unbuilt. Government agencies are captured by the corrupt officials who run them. Officials who sign away mining rights, weaken labour protections, and pass liberalization laws do so knowing they will be rewarded.

This corruption is not an error in the system; it is how the system works. A political class enriched by foreign capital has every incentive to keep the economy de-industrialized and dependent on resource extraction, on imported goods, and on the remittances of workers forced abroad because there is no dignified work at home. The Philippines stays poor not because it lacks resources, but because its institutions are designed to ensure those resources flow outward to foreign corporations, including Canadian ones.

When indigenous peoples resist displacement from their ancestral lands, when farmers fight back against the landlords who exploit them for generations, when journalists report on abuses or unionists demand fair wages, the state’s answer is red-tagging – branding organizers as communist terrorists, a designation that functions as a warrant for arrest, harassment, and killing.

Journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio was arrested in 2020 on fabricated weapons charges widely understood as retaliation for her human rights reporting. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, was placed on a Philippine government terrorist list. Targeted, she said, in retaliation for documenting the killings and displacement of indigenous communities. If a journalist or a UN official is not safe from red tagging, no one is.

Under the Status of Visiting Forces Agreement between Canada and the Philippines, some 600 Canadian troops rotate through the Philippines conducting military exercises in the West Philippine Sea, exercises that displace farmers and fisherfolk from their livelihoods. That military presence is not a peacekeeping gesture. It is the enforcement arm of the same economic system that wrote the Rice Liberalization Law. It protects Canadian mining interests and keeps Filipino wages low enough to make foreign investment attractive.

Ka Daning was direct: “Canadian military troops are harming farmers and fisherfolk who have to stop making a living when the military exercises are taking place on the land they till and the waters they fish.” The effect is disastrous. “The farmers, peasants and fisherfolk who produce the food for the Philippines are the ones who grow hungry.”

On April 19, 2026, 19 people were killed in Toboso, Negros Occidental – peasant advocates, student leaders, and journalists organizing and documenting struggles where injustice and poverty runs deep and resistance is met with force. The military called it an armed encounter. BAYAN Canada and other organizations call it a massacre of civilians killed for their political work.

This is the system Ka Daning laid out in that Winnipeg church basement: neoliberalism opens the country to foreign extraction, corrupt officials lock those policies in place, and the Philippine security forces crush those who fight back. Filipinos are left with two choices: resist and face the consequences, or leave and build someone else’s country.

The people killed in Negros stood with those who chose to resist. Their deaths are not separate from Canadian foreign policy. They are a consequence of it.

Diwa Marcelino is a community and labour organizer based in Treaty 1 territory. He is a co-founder of Health Care for All Manitoba, a longtime organizer with Migrante Manitoba, and currently serves as interim Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and board member of KAIROS. He has spent more than 25 years working at the intersection of migrant rights, worker justice, and grassroots organizing.