Rappler Talk: How PH will host Obama, Xi, leaders in APEC 2015

MANILA, Philippines – Rappler sits down with Ambassador Marciano Paynor Jr., the person at the helm of the 2015 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) National Organizing Council, to talk about the massive preparation involved in hosting some of the world’s biggest leaders.

Among those attending the 2015 APEC summit are United States President Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

The Philippines first hosted the APEC summit in 1996 in Subic, Zambales. Back then, the country was dubbed as “Asia’s next economic tiger.” 

Watch the interview with Paynor here and read the transcript below: 

Hello, I’m Ayee Macaraig. Welcome to Rappler Talk.

In just a few days, the Philippines will host 20 world leaders and 7,000 delegates for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation or APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting and related events. 

What does it take to prepare for a global gathering of this scale, and to secure 21 world leaders?

Today, we talk to Marciano Paynor Jr. He is the director general of the APEC National Organizing Council. 

Ayee Macaraig: Hello, Ambassador. 21 world leaders under one roof. What kind of preparations does that entail? 

Three years of thorough preparation. If I may, there are 19 heads of state, and 2 economic leaders because Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong China are technically not heads of state. We call them economic leaders just so everybody gets to be on the same footing.

This is all of 3 years in preparation. And when we started our hosting on December 8, we prepared for 25 meetings. This ballooned to now, it’s current number is 44, and these are not 1 meeting per say but a cluster of meetings. So the 44 are a cluster of meetings. When we prepare, we prepare first everything: hotels, airport arrivals, transportation, venue for the meetings, spouses’ program, cultural presentation. The works. 

Because we need to portray or to show the Philippines as host and it was agreed that we show the Filipino as a young, vibrant, intelligent, innovative and hospitable people. Young because 50% of our population are 25 and below so that’s a young population. Very vibrant. 

Walk us through the coming days. What are the key highlights? 

The key highlight of this Economic Leaders Meeting is when the leaders meet because that’s when they discuss what’s called the Leaders Declaration. It is a summation of everything that has transpired in the 43 other meetings prior to. It starts off with the senior officials having the CSOM or Concluding Senior Officials’ Meeting, and this is where they all agree that this is the final draft of the leaders’ declaration. 

Then a day later, we have the APEC ministerial meeting, and this is a meeting of all foreign ministers, and ministers responsible for trade. They look at the draft leaders’ declaration, put their imprimatur and sends this now to the leaders. When this reaches the leaders, all of the economies already have consensus. That’s what the 21 economic leaders have decided in effect to be the year’s work. 

China’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that President Xi Jinping is coming. Do you expect all leaders to be here? 

With President Xi Jinping confirming, we have official confirming from 11 others. 12 all in all but we expect that most, if not all, will attend. If there are cancellations last minute, it’s because of a very logical reason for them, a real serious but for the most part, most leaders attend. 

How many delegates will be here? What’s the total?  

Our total expectation is about 7,000. That includes foreign journalists. We would think 2,000. That’s just the journalists and the other delegates and those assisting their leaders and ministers all together 5,000 of them. For the 21 economies. But by the way, we have a guest country Colombia which will attend the Pacific Dialogue composed of Chile, Peru, Colombia and Mexico. The Latin American members of APEC, and then having a dialogue with all the other members. That’s an innovation for this hosting. 

This is the first time the Philippines is hosting APEC since 1996. What lessons from then can be applied now? 

Lessons then and now, there’s no substitute for preparation. If you have prepared for the event well enough then the likelihood for something falling along the way is less and therefore if that’s the case, then it bodes well for proper hosting. We as a people have one thing going for us, and that’s our, the fact that we are naturally hospitable. So hosting is second nature to us and therefore we don’t even have to think about it. The problem sometimes is we have to temper it because sometimes we can be suffocating in our hospitality. Oh, you might need this, and some people need to be left alone, give them space. This is a challenge, some of the lessons we learned from way back when.

The one main big difference are the security issues. The security issues now are far more intense, if not serious, these are the things we need to prepare for. I would hazard a guess that two-thirds of our effort is on that, on security. 

Speaking of security, you’ve said that preparations for the Pope’s visit are only one-tenth of that of APEC? How come? 

The basic requirements are the same because the Pope is a head of state. Here we have 21 leaders but 19 heads of state, heads of government so security preparations are the same for everyone. The Pope’s preparations are 1/10 of this because 21, it’s not 20th, it’s about 1/10th, half, and two because we have leaders who in their own or because they are really high-profile, high security risks they bring this everywhere they go, and when they come here, there are 5 of them, 6 of them, the challenge is so much greater. 

The difference being that when the Pope came here, the challenge was how do you prevent the enthusiastic people from coming near, moving forward. We succeeded by employing a lot of our soldiers who had to stand in the heat, in the rain, etc because the minute they left their post, people would come in. 

This time, because of the holidays, the fact that by normal standards, APEC is not something that would interest them as much as the Pope had, we do not expect a lot of people along the streets but traffic. Traffic is a major and serious consideration because it has security implications. We all know how the current development in the threat situation worldwide has escalated and things we cannot discuss in public but we all know that the threat now is 10 times greater than it was in 1996. So there goes the challenge, and that’s why I said two-thirds of our efforts now are around security.

How do we address that? What agencies are involved? Will it be PSG, PNP, AFP? 

The security committee, would you believe, has about 21 members if I remember correctly. These include DND, DILG so you have chair, co-chair, then you have the other agencies like Immigration, Customs, DSWD, DOH, Bureau of Fire Department, NDRRMC, and others that need to be there including our intelligence agencies to ensure the holding of our meeting goes successfully without any untoward incident. It’s a very big challenge. 

How then do you ensure mobility of the leaders? 

It’s simple enough. You experience the traffic on a daily basis. The time of our leaders is very, very important. Therefore, they cannot be, they should not be affected by the traffic. How do you mitigate that? The only way to do that is there are no other cars on the road because one, it does affect the speed at which your delegations travel, one, but two and more importantly, it has security implications. If there are other vehicles on the road, then it poses a security threat and some of our economies here, it’s part of their requirement than when their leader is doing, there should be no other vehicles moving. 

For example you’re in EDSA, if one world leader is passing by, everyone has to stop? 

Yes, stop and be on the side and that’s the reason we have road closures, the APEC lane, this is especially true when the leader moves. We have to make sure. For security reasons. The news is full of these examples of how the opposition can make life difficult, if not final, for their designated targets. 

The budget department said P9.8 billion was allocated for APEC preparations. Where does the money go? 

Most of this goes to security. The rest of it goes to transportation, meals, hotel rentals, uniforms of our people, various different expenditures that normally go into hosting a multilateral meeting such as this. For the entire year. But unusually they ask, then you know, spending so much, etc. 

But that money goes back to our economy. It pumps the economy. For us, we have to look at it from a positive point of view. We have to spend money to be a member of an organization such as this because we have to host in turn but what I can assure you of is we have been very deliberate in ensuring that our expenses are necessary. And we do not spend for things that are not needed in hosting multilateral meetings such as this. 

You’ve said before that China spent more just on the leaders’ meeting alone? 

I said one economy. Because well, they are entitled to it. They have the means so why begrudge them that? All I’m saying is I’m making a comparison so everybody knows to each his own way of hosting. It is in that context. So I always say that if they spend that much and didn’t have that kind of money, that’s another story. But we have spent X amount for the whole year, I think it’s a fairly decent amount. 

Every year, we have the APEC summit. What makes the Philippine hosting different? 

That was one of our difficulties especially coming after China because China’s hosting has really been a statement of its infrastructure. It’s hospitality, as well and so on. But for the Philippines, because we have the facility of language, we are able to interact more directly and intimately with our delegates. It goes a long way.

The Chinese, because they don’t speak English, and because English for the most part is the medium of communication in the conference, in APEC, most of our delegates speak English so if you go to an English-speaking country, it’s so much more comfortable to them because they are able to communicate. Two, our people are by nature hospitable so we don’t have to exert much effort in that department. It’s our nature. Natural sa atin. 

So that’s what distinguishes us from the rest. We smile easily. We want to ensure our guests are comfortable and that’s my segue into asking or asking all of our citizens to make sure they look at this from the proper perspective, they are our visitors. Let’s respect them. Let’s give them what’s due them the way we would respect our own visitors when people come to visit us. 

Let’s put aside all these other issues we have, bilateral. Not that I’m saying we don’t talk about it. We should and we must but there’s always the proper forum for that. In this day and age unfortunately, some people take advantage of this kind of demonstrations and it becomes a security issue more than an issue to articulate your advocacies. Those are two different things. For us, you say what you want because this is a free country but it must be done properly and being mindful of all other considerations. 

Critics cite the inconvenience APEC is causing the public. They say cancelling flights and closing roads show the infrastructure problem of the Philippine economy. 

First of all, isn’t it true we do have infrastructure issues? It is true. How much more, we can’t show it any better than now, correct? Why is it we have to cancel flights? Because we only have one runway and if you increase the number of flights that have security considerations, meaning when they are flying, nobody else should be flying, then by necessity, you have to cancel flights. 

Then you have to understand that this is not just plain and simple inconveniencing them or a deliberate way to inconvenience them. This is the farthest from the truth but what we need to do is accept that this is what we are given. We work around that and we try as much as possible not to inconvenience the public but we have to accept that people will be inconvenienced. But what’s in it for us? 

I said in an earlier interview that the statistics I was looking at showed that 80% of our total trade, whether importation or exports is with APEC member economies, 80% and that total trade from 1989 when APEC was first established up to 2013 which was the last date of those statistics grew on an average of 8%. If you have a group which the aggregate economy is increasing at 8% every year, I’m no economist, but I think I should be convinced it should be good for us.

What output do we expect after the meeting? 

There are two I know of that are very important. One is the micro, small and medium enterprises or for lack of a better acronym we call them MSMEs. We have now put them into center stage. Why? 90% of Philippine manufacturing is MSME. So it stands to reason we put them as part of the total agenda of APEC. 

The second is our finance agenda, consolidated into what they call the Cebu Action Plan, and this is how do we further reduce tariffs, how do we make economic interaction among the 21 member economies easier. The specifics of that our substantives office under our SOM Chair Usec Del Rosario can elucidate but for me, top of mind, those two are very important and will definitely trickle down to everyone. 

Besides the economic agenda, events like this are an occasion to showcase a country’s culture. How will the Philippines present Filipino culture? 

I can only speak of the presentations we’ve had from meeting one to meeting 37 because that’s already finished. The committee on entertainment, tourism, etc is chaired by Secretary Mon Jimenez and from the very beginning, a year into our presentations, he said we have to portray in our cultural presentations the Philippines. For many of the delegates who may not know too much about the Philippines we have to tell them who we are. And that’s where he said we are a young, intelligent, vibrant, innovative and hospitable people. 

So that in effect was what they did but from that first meeting all the way down to meeting #37. And the idea was because part of our hosting was we bring the meeting to the various different areas in the Philippines, Boracay, Cebu,  Bacolod, Iloilo, Tagaytay, Bagac, Clark and we would have gone to Legazpi but unfortunately the typhoon affected us and that was when we had to transfer to Manila post-haste for that alone we had to spend there and then double the expense and we had to do redundancies and that’s why we have a huge budget.

All two-thirds if not four-fifths of the performers were locals, from the area. I’ve seen all of it. We are all subjective but I think Secretary Jimenez is right, we have young, innovative, intelligent, vibrant people and very hospitable to boot. For me, that’s what stuck in my mind because really no tiniklings, none of the traditional, more modern but also part of historical. In Cebu, we did the Sinulog but it was very, very well presented. For the leaders, it’s secret. 

And then there will be the traditional family photo where the leaders will wear the piña barong. How does this go? 

Before the leaders are ushered into the dining area, they come one after the other, they have to come and be greeted properly. The President will be there, will greet them, they will have a photo, have their cocktails. When everyone is in, the President invites them to the photo place where they have the so-called family photo with spouses wearing the barongs the president has gifted them. This is the traditional way then they have their pictures, and then they go have the dinner. After that, they have the cultural presentation, then time to go. 

You’ve been a diplomat. What do you think the Philippine hosting of APEC shows about the state of the country’s economy and its standing in the international community? 

When we were starting this, for budget purposes, we budgeted for only 25 meetings only. It ballooned to 44. And why, my understanding is some of the other smaller meetings, oh maybe we can hold the meeting here already instead of next year, we need to discuss it, etc. etc. They just wanted to hold it here because they’re having a good time here. That’s one way of looking at it. For me, it’s important to note that our guests recognize that despite our relatively meager resources, we are able to host them properly and for me, I think we have shown that without exception in all of the meetings we had hosted. 

So I think they feel we are serious when it comes to the hosting but we are equally serious when it comes to the subject matter, the agenda of the meetings. It can’t be helped that in certain places they finish the agenda sooner so they can go out and have fun. Boracay. That’s one of the most difficult hostings from our POV, from a logistical and operational POV. It’s an island. It’s supposed to be for having fun, not for serious conferences but we were able to do it so I guess it speaks well about us as a people. Serious at work, serious at play. – Rappler.com