“buy filipino”

For 2009 and beyond, I’ll be a full-fledged member of the movement called “Buy Filipino Made Product.”

If truth be told, I began practicing this tack, albeit half-heartedly, way back when JoeCon was our secretary at DTI. His pitch then was that Philippine made products could be at par, if not better, than those produced elsewhere in the world. From that sound byte, he coined the catchphrase, “Yes, the Filipino Can!” But because pundits at DTI are a hilarious lot, they lobbied for the slogan to be in Filipino for consistency. And so it became, “Oo, ang Filipino lata!”

But I digress.

Buying products “Made in the Philippines” gets the businesses going; it sustains jobs and even creates more; and it allows money to change hands among Pinoys inside this country of 7,100 islands. All these are good for the economy, the better to placate, if not eliminate, recession jitters.

But, let me make one thing clear: this is only as far as my spending goes. Because if friends insist on giving me a high end YSL shirt, they’ll earn my eternal gratitude. Just a caveat though: they just have to make sure it's a YSL original. As in, Yari Sa Liliw.