A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck approximately 20 kilometres off Sarangani province in Mindanao on Monday, June 8, killing at least 35 people, collapsing buildings, triggering tsunami warnings, and sending tremors felt as far as 420 kilometres away in Manado, Indonesia. Al Jazeera published photo galleries from the disaster zone; the BBC carried video footage of schoolchildren running from a collapsing roof during the quake. The Guardian described tsunami alerts being triggered across the region. Rescue operations are ongoing, with the death toll expected to rise. Sarangani is one of the Philippines’ poorer provinces, with infrastructure that reflects decades of underinvestment in a region that has also grappled with prolonged insurgencies, including operations against both Islamist groups and communist New People’s Army factions.
The received wisdom
The standard humanitarian framing of earthquake response emphasises the need for immediate international assistance, better early warning systems, and — in the longer term — investment in seismically resilient construction standards. The Philippines sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire and has always been acutely vulnerable to seismic events; the lesson, on this reading, is that wealthy countries and international institutions need to provide more robust technical support for building codes, evacuation infrastructure, and disaster response capacity in vulnerable nations.
There is also a climate-adjacent reading: more frequent extreme weather events in the Philippines, combined with the displacement that follows disasters, create compounding vulnerabilities for communities already stressed by poverty and conflict. International climate finance, disaster risk reduction funding, and multilateral engagement — the kind of architecture being dismantled by the current American administration — are precisely what the Philippines needs, and precisely what is at risk. The moral imperative of wealthy-country assistance is not diminished by the Philippines’ own governance failures.
This is a defensible position. Sarangani’s poverty is real, its infrastructure deficits are real, and the gap between what the international community could provide and what it typically does provide is real.
A different read
But there is a harder domestic accountability question that the international-assistance framing tends to displace. The Philippines is not a poor country in the sense that it lacks resources; it is a country with profound governance dysfunctions that systematically prevent resources from reaching the people most exposed to risk.
Mindanao’s Sarangani province is a political fiefdom — it has been represented in national government by members of the Pacquiao family and associated political networks. The broader Mindanao region, covering roughly a third of the Philippine landmass and containing a substantial share of its population, has been the site of half a century of conflict, emergency rule, and governance by political dynasties whose interest in public infrastructure investment has historically been shaped by patronage calculations rather than public safety ones.
The Building Code of the Philippines has been nominally updated multiple times. Enforcement is a different matter. The BBC footage of schoolchildren fleeing a collapsing roof is not simply the consequence of geography. School buildings in the Philippines that collapse during earthquakes collapse because they were built by contractors with political connections, under codes that were not enforced, in a system where accountability for construction quality runs through mayors and governors whose continued tenure depends on the contractors in question. This is well documented and widely understood within the Philippines.
This is not a unique Philippine failure — Turkey’s catastrophic earthquake casualties in 2023 were driven by similar dynamics of politically protected construction shortcuts, in a country with sophisticated building codes and entirely inadequate enforcement. Japan’s earthquake death tolls, by contrast, are consistently lower than population-adjusted comparisons would suggest, because Japan has spent decades enforcing seismic construction standards with ferocious consistency, including political accountability for failures.
The lesson of earthquake mortality data across comparable seismic zones is not primarily about international aid. It is about the quality of domestic governance. Countries with functional legal systems, enforced building codes, independent inspectorates, and genuine political accountability for construction standards kill fewer people in earthquakes. Countries where political dynasties control public contracting, where enforcement is selective, and where legal accountability for negligence is rare kill more.
International assistance matters at the emergency response stage. But the pattern of deaths in Sarangani, and across Mindanao more broadly, is substantially the product of a political system that distributes construction contracts through patronage rather than competence. The progressive instinct to frame all such disasters as demands for more international money misses the point. The money has, in various forms, arrived before. The buildings still collapse.
What to watch
- The official death toll: Sarangani’s population density and infrastructure suggest the 35 confirmed deaths as of early reporting may significantly understate the final count.
- Whether the Duterte impeachment trial currently underway affects emergency response coordination — Mindanao is politically complex and central government authority is contested.
- Tsunami warning resolution: the initial alert has prompted evacuations across a wide area; if a significant wave materialises, the casualties could be substantially higher.
- Philippine government’s post-event assessment: whether any of the building collapses lead to prosecution of contractors or officials is a live test of institutional accountability.
— J