Resolving poverty, social ills

Filipinos are trumping all apparent attempts to prevent the holding of the May 2010 elections, through Charter change or other means. Even the legal Left is gearing to field four senatorial candidates through Makabayan, a regular political party its stalwarts have just set up.

Filipinos weighed down by poverty and sickened by corruption and other ills should now discern the machinations of political actors to ensure that the coming election will be a victory of social transformation.

The stakes are high. If Filipinos are able to minimize, if not totally eliminate the nefarious effects of guns, goons and gold in the 2010 election, they just might achieve transformational governance that can erase poverty and deprivation, and propel the Philippines into its rightful place as a sovereign, resource-rich country.

All politicians talk of liberating Filipinos from poverty, a concept felt but not always understood. For a time, the share of the population living below the national poverty line reached 50 percent in the mid-1980s. With more labor exportation and other factors, this was brought down to less than a third in recent years.

The proportion of our people living on below $1.25/day declined from 34.9 percent in 1985 (under the Marcos dictatorship) to 22.6 percent in 2006, or a reduction of about 2 percent per year over two decades.

According to the World Bank, however, even though the decline is significant, our gains are lower than those of our neighbors, particularly Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and China, all of which had long outstripped us.

It also warned that, relative to the population, the absolute number of the poor based on the $1.25/day poverty line increased from 18.5 million poor people in 1985 to 19.7 million in 2006.

Poverty estimates could be confusing. National poverty rate increased between 2003 and 2006, although official estimates of poverty declined in four of the country’s 17 administrative regions.

Poverty declined in three regions in Mindanao: Zamboanga from 49.2 percent to 45.3 percent, Caraga from 54 percent to 52.6 percent, and Northern Mindanao from 44 percent to 43.1 percent. Poverty in Western Visayas also declined from 39.2 percent to 38.6 percent.

However, poverty headcounts (or in per capita terms) in the other 13 regions increased in 2006, compared to 2003, and that simply means more people are poorer than ever.

In particular, poverty in the volatile Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) swelled by almost 10 percentage points (to 61.8 percent). In fact, poverty, not kinship and patronage, is the culprit behind the massive vote-selling and vote-buying in this region.

Poverty is a predominantly a rural phenomenon in the Philippines, which explains why the rural poor has been trooping in droves to the cities. Credit the government for outright neglect of the rural areas in terms of employment and livelihood opportunities, social services like health and education, or even of physical infrastructure support like roads and bridges, and irrigation services to ensure agricultural production in farmer-dominated rural areas.

In 2006, about three-quarters of the poor resided in rural areas. Estimates also show that rural poverty increased (although marginally) between 2003 and 2006 and that poverty among agricultural households is about three times higher than poverty in other sectors.

Not surprisingly, urban poverty is on the rise, since the rural poor have been coming in droves to cities since World War II. While rural poverty remains more than double that of urban poverty, the share of urban poor to total poverty has been increasing since 2000 due to rapid urbanization and inequitable income distribution.

Between 2003 and 2006, the share of the poor population living in the urban areas increased from 23.2 percent to 28.8 percent. With rural-urban migration and rapid population growth, this trend can be expected to continue over time unless rapid urbanization is accompanied by better income distribution.

Filipinos have always been cynical of government, even while elections are a phenomenon every three years and they can be politically rambunctious at times. This cynicism, aside from kinship and close community ties, has shifted the burden of socioeconomic advancement and social protection on the family and the community.

Many economists have actually noted that the institutions of the family and community, not government, are the major institutions ensuring social equity and democracy through intrafamily and interhousehold transfers. These private transfers are considerable, reaching about two-fifths or more of the population.

Remittances from abroad comprise about three-fourths of total private transfers to family and community. Our overseas contract workers do not just ensure children will go to school and remain well-fed and healthy, but they also fund community welfare projects like street lighting, educational materials for day care centers and schools, or even medicines for rural health units.

Entire communities actually prop up development projects with their own resources and labor. The time-honored bayani-han (cooperation) system has made possible the provision of textbooks and encyclopedias, laboratory instruments, and even gates for schools. Community volunteers pave roads and construct schools, clinics and irrigation systems.

Filipinos should now demand more from government, rather than continue to impose upon themselves the expensive task of providing for social needs and support services that are the government’s mandated burden. What are taxes for, anyway?

The poor and vulnerable in the Philippines suffer from risks arising from threats to their human rights; lack of employment and income security; poor governance and government corruption; lack of education and health services; and environmental deterioration and climate change, among others.

These are exactly the benchmarks with which we should weigh the agenda of political candidates now already making themselves extra audible and visible, lest we add more confusion and disorder to our already threatened polity.–Nora O. Gamolo, Manila Times

ngamolo@manilatimes.net/ngamolo@gmail.com