Thank you, Your Excellency, and Vivian who has been a good mentor, whose advice has been invaluable.

The Philippines thanks Singapore for leading the 3G process and convening this dialogue with the G20 Troika. The engagement of the 3G with the G20 is crucial in advocating for a more effective, accountable and inclusive framework of global governance, recognizing the impact that G20 decisions have on global economic and financial markets.

I have said in other forums that the greatest threat to multilateralism in this age of in-your-face unilateralism is multilateralism run riot; particularly in its Balkanization into large subgroups. These aggrupations once         had valid concerns but history has, if not successfully addressed those concerns, passed them by; so we have significant vote blocs that can       be harnessed to any unilateral purpose, depending on the persuasive powers of the unilateralist most concerned with the issue at hand.

This gives ammunition to the crusade to discredit multilateralism. Yet another disturbing factor is the rise of politically unaccountable and rarely transparent civil society with its own agenda, which is mostly to discredit the nation state system that created the UN and substitute it with a civil society sometimes indistinguishable from their whims and personal agenda.

It might have started with the first Balkanization of the United Nations by the establishment of an exclusive, irreplaceable and inelastic Security Council with interests and concerns exclusive to its five members, and an attitude of nostalgia for the lost and irretrievable glory of dead nation state- empires whose shells are subsumed in a continental federation.

The Philippines appreciates the G20 Presidency of Japan for its efforts to achieve an openness, inclusivity and sustainability of economic and social reforms that are centered on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Special mention must be made of Japan’s priorities in innovation and the provision of international public goods, such as global health care and quality infrastructure, as they resonate with our development priorities.

On the outcome of the Osaka Summit, we commend the adoption of the G20 Implementation Framework on Marine Plastic Litter to reduce the pollution and environmental and marine degradation it causes. Plastic pollution is a real concern to a country like mine which accounts for a great deal of it. There are serious moves to ban plastic which might seem quixotic; but over the years many bad habits have eliminated themselves through public campaigns.