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The Philippines Book Blockade
by Robin Hemley

The culture of corruption is so widespread and entrenched in the Philippines that polls sometimes ask, “Is this country hopeless?” Earlier this year, I stumbled upon a particularly egregious case of corruption that would have me answer the pollsters’ question in two parts: Yes, the government is hopeless. No, the people are not.

I’ve spent much of the past year in the Philippines with my family on a sabbatical. I’m no stranger to the country. I’m married into the culture, have written about it extensively, and have been a frequent visitor and sometime resident since early 1999.

What’s become known throughout the Philippines and increasingly in the international community as the “Book blockade” was a case of corruption I stumbled upon in March and subsequently wrote about for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency in an article titled, “The Great Book Blockade of 2009.” http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/manila/1dispatch6.html

In a nutshell, the Department of Customs, known as perhaps the most corrupt department in the Philippine government decided in January that they were going to start taxing the importation of books into the country. Sounds reasonable enough but for the matter of an international U.N. treaty called the Florence Agreement that the Philippines signed in 1952 and to which it has adhered... up until now. The Florence Agreement is one of the nobler treaties in existence in that it guarantees the free flow of knowledge between countries. In the aftermath of World War Two and in the nascent years of the Cold War, this was no small matter. The Agreement specifically mandated signatories to allow for the duty-free importation of books. What types of books?  That was the beauty of the agreement. In plain language, the Florence Agreement makes no distinction regarding the kind of book that is eligible for duty exemption, except for one type: books used solely for advertising. Everything else gets a free pass.

 In January, the Department of Customs and the Department of Finance decided to join forces to violate this international treaty. They decided, quite unilaterally, to start imposing taxes on all imported books, 1% for “educational books” and 5% for everything else. Importers and bookstore owners in the Philippines balked. No matter. Customs promptly impounded all air shipments of books entering the Philippines. From January 27th to March 17th, they held up air shipments of books while enormous storage fees accrued. Finally, the booksellers had no choice but to give in or face financial ruin.

Customs has subsequently argued that Philippine law allows for these duties, but even if this were so (and it’s clearly not), international law trumps local law. The international community takes treaty violations very seriously, but unfortunately the Philippines does not.

After my piece was published, a hue and cry went out on the Internet among Filipino bloggers and book lovers in a manner that took me completely by surprise and that must have caught the Philippine government unawares. Within twenty-four hours, the issue was all over the blogosphere. People were Tweeting about the “book blockade” as it immediately became known, so much so that it became a “trending topic.”  A Facebook group was formed by Louie Aguinaldo, “Filipinos Against the Taxation of Books by Customs,” and within two weeks it had recruited over 14,000 concerned book lovers. Happily, the protest jumped from the Internet to the mainstream media when Manuel Quezon III, a popular television commentator and columnist for the Philippine Inquirer, wrote a piece also titled “The Great Book Blockade of 2009,” as well as a smart and well-researched timeline of the controversy, starting with the text of the Florence Agreement (which is available on the Internet @ http://www.quezon.ph/2009/05/10/the-great-book-blockade-of-2009-timeline-and-readings/). And I found myself more or less at the center of this controversy, with reporters from the Philippines to Germany contacting me, as well as a U.S. Embassy official who told me that if there’s one lesson he had learned from this it’s that “we have greatly underestimated the power and reach of the internet as an organizational tool in the Philippines.”

Indeed, that’s what makes me feel the Philippines is not hopeless, and it must at least send a little frisson of anxiety through the air-conditioned offices of corrupt officials who take the fatalism of the general public for granted. Still, the Philippines is expert at ignoring its citizens, despite a vocal and free press. Several people have told me that they believe the government will simply try to wait out the protests as they do with virtually all scandals and cases of injustice in the country. The principle here is simple. Allow the protestors to scream and cry all they want and maintain silence in the face of this until book lovers wear themselves out and simply retreat back into their worlds of make believe.

While some senators and congressmen in the Philippines have called for an investigation of Customs, and one congressman wrote to the President of the Philippines deriding the new tax (his letter was ignored), Customs is simply digging in its heels. The author of the new tax, Undersecretary of Finance Estela Sales, has recently stated that novels should be taxed at 5% because “novels are not educational.” 

AWP

Robin Hemley is the author of eight books, most recently DO-OVER! (Little, Brown, May, 2009) and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship among other awards. He teaches at The University of Iowa in the Nonfiction Writing Program.

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