For many Filipinos, jobs and the good life are still scarce

MANILA — At his vegetable stand on a busy street in the Philippine capital, Lamberto Tagarro is surrounded by gleaming, modern skyscrapers, between which a river of luxury vehicles flows.

“The Philippines is the rising tiger economy of Asia,” Mr. Tagarro said. “But only the rich people are going up and up. I’m not feeling it.”

Mr. Tagarro earns the equivalent of about $5 a day working before dawn and after dark, battling petty corruption to maintain his improvised sidewalk stand and dealing with rising wholesale prices for the onions and tomatoes he sells.

The Philippines, with a 7.8 percent expansion of gross domestic product in the first quarter of 2013, has the fastest-growing economy in East Asia, surpassing even China’s. The country has a red-hot stock market, a strong currency and a steady stream of accolades and upgrades from international ratings agencies.

But Mr. Tagarro’s experience — of being left behind by the country’s newfound prosperity — mirrors that of many Filipinos, according to the latest government poverty and employment data.

An estimated seven million Filipinos, about 17 percent of the work force, have gone overseas in search of jobs, according to the Asian Development Bank. For those who stay home, options are few.

Despite the rapidly expanding economy, the country’s unemployment rate increased to 7.5 percent in April, from 6.9 percent at the same time a year earlier. About three million Filipinos who want to work are unemployed.

“Higher rates of economic growth over recent years have not made a serious dent in the employment problem in the Philippines,” the Asian Development Bank reported in its recent Asian Development Outlook report.

President Benigno S. Aquino III ran on a platform of clamping down on corruption, improving the business environment in the country and addressing widespread poverty. In his first three years in office, Mr. Aquino removed high-level government officials accused of corruption, cracked down on tax evaders and aggressively courted foreign investment.

Though his efforts to improve the economy have received accolades, he has had less success in addressing the country’s persistent, widespread poverty.

Mr. Aquino’s political opponents argued before recent legislative elections that his actions had further enriched the wealthy and left the poor behind.

The Philippines still has a strong service sector. In 2011, it overtook India as a top provider of offshore call centers. But the country lacks the manufacturing base that has lifted millions of people out of poverty in other Asian countries.

In countries like China, the rural poor increased their income by finding jobs in factories. That is rarely an option in the Philippines, and few poor people from the countryside are qualified to work in a call center.

The country’s latest poverty data, released in April, shows almost no improvement in the last six years. About 10 percent of Filipinos live in extreme poverty, unable to meet their most basic food needs. This is the same figure as in 2006 and 2009, the previous years when poverty data was gathered, according to the National Statistical Coordination Board.

The board also estimated that 22.3 percent of families were living in poverty in the first four months of 2012, compared with 22.9 percent in 2009 and 23.4 percent in 2006.

According to government estimates, more than nine million extremely poor Filipino households are not able to earn the 5,460 pesos, or $135, needed each month to eat. That amount is about the same as the price of a back-row upper-level ticket to the recent Aerosmith concert in Manila, where many of the country’s wealthy could be found holding parties into the night.

Other reports confirm the government’s findings that poverty has persisted.

In a survey by the independent Manila polling group Social Weather Stations, the number of Filipino families reporting that they periodically go hungry has increased in recent months.

The survey found that 19.2 percent of survey respondents, about 3.9 million families, reported going hungry. This is up from 16.3 percent in December 2012, when a similar survey was done.

Meanwhile, the Philippines has slipped on the U.N. Human Development Index, ranking 114th of 187 countries in 2012 in categories like health, education and infant mortality. The country had a ranking of 105 in 2007.

Poverty is particularly acute in rural areas, where growth has been sluggish in recent years even as the national economy and urban areas have expanded rapidly. The hardest hit has been the fishing sector, which has contracted. Farmers and fishermen are consistently ranked as two of the poorest groups in the country.

That is no revelation to Joel Cesista, a 26-year-old fisherman who supports his wife and infant son. A resident of Bataan Province, a poor rural area west of Manila, he cannot find factory work and has no land to farm, so he embarks on a dangerous, marginally profitable effort to find fish in the ocean about twice a month.

“There is no permanent work here,” said Mr. Cesista. “All we have is fishing.”

Mr. Cesista and four other men take a 33-foot boat nearly 200 miles, or about 320 kilometers, into the South China Sea for a week at a time to fish for tuna.

On a good trip, he can earn about $200. He often earns less than that and sometimes, when expenses for fuel, bait and boat rental exceed the catch, he is paid nothing at all. Other times, he is just glad to make it home alive.

“We have almost sunk in storms,” he said. “We have no radio and no one to rescue us, except the other fishermen.”

The Philippine government is trying to address poverty in the country through general economic development, but also through direct intervention.

Since 2008, with the support of international organizations, the country has had a conditional cash-transfer program that gives money to the country’s poorest people in return for actions like keeping their children in school.

The program, which is assisting nearly four million families, has received positive reviews from international organizations, but it has also been besieged by allegations of corruption in the distribution of payments. Though the program is not showing an effect on national poverty figures, the government continues to support it.

“Without the conditional cash transfers, the poverty numbers that we are seeing here could have been higher,” Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said after the release of the new poverty data.

Julita Cabading, 56, a Manila resident with a college degree in accounting, had hoped to benefit from one of the government’s antipoverty programs. She said she had not been able to find work as an accountant because employers preferred to hire younger people, and she could not afford training to improve her job skills.

So Mrs. Cabading earns the equivalent of about $3 a day selling newspapers, pens and gum along the sidewalk in Manila. When she applied for government assistance, she was told that she would need to wait at home as long as two months for a government representative to interview her.

She was unable do this because she had to work at her small stand to pay her rent. She has since borrowed from a local lender and now she is in a common poverty trap in the Philippines: She is working at subsistence wages, without government help, to survive and pay off her loans.

“The Philippines is improving,” she said while waiting for the next customer at her small stand. “But it hasn’t reached me yet.” –Jes Aznar for The International Herald Tribune