Foreign aid: Accept with caution

I was invited recently by Sam Chittick of the Australian Embassy to speak to a group of expats and locals, all of whom are engaged in providing assistance to this country. The invitation immediately evoked memories of Australia. I visited Melbourne/Sydney for the first time in the early Sixties and met Donald Horne, who authored that landmark book The Lucky Country, and some beautiful people like the poet Judith Wright and Asian specialist Denis Warner.

At a hotel at Kings Cross in Sydney I was introduced to fine Australian wine and that fabulous Sydney rock oyster, which I now regard as the world’s best.

I did not realize what a major player Australia is in the Philippines until I visited their embassy in Makati.

I told them nothing new; I merely confirmed what they already knew. My most important bona-fide is that I am now 89 years old. I was a senior high school student at the Far Eastern University when the war with Japan broke out in 1941. At the time, I was already quite sensitive to domestic politics and the peccadillos of our leaders — Quezon chasing the pretty girls in Manila and dividing Quezon City among his mestizo cronies. I can say with the authority of hindsight that though he did not stay that long, our best president was Ramon Magsaysay, and the worst, Ferdinand Marcos. We were a scant 18 million in 1941, now we are a hundred million. Sure, Manila is now studded with soaring skyscrapers, its gated suburbs preen with mansions and flashy cars crowd our streets. Progress? Yes, but underneath this seeming affluence is rot. We were far better off in the Fifties, the Sixties, when we were the leading nation in Southeast Asia, but our neighbors overtook us and we are now this region’s “sick man.” How did we become this way?

I recounted our dismal past, what shackles the Filipino character, our yabang and hypocrisy, and most of all, our shameless colonization by our own elite.

Don’t quibble about it. This nation needs foreign aid, foreign investments the way similarly impoverished countries do. But foreign aid is not the panacea for our poverty. On the negative side, it could lead to mendicancy, to the belief that a nation’s fate is realized by prayer rather than by harnessing a people’s industry and creativity.

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Why are we poor? Again, I repeated the ancient reasons, and the miserere.

In accepting foreign aid and do-gooding international agencies, it is necessary for the recipient people (and government) to look into the background of these agencies. It is possible that they penetrate a territory with the intention of mapping it so that its resources — its mines, its gas potential — can be exploited. Some may even be DPAs — deep penetration agents — sleepers, as they are called, like the Japanese gardeners who were in the Philippines and turned out to be officers of the Japanese Imperial Army. They may also come not so much to spy, but to spread ideas inimical to the well being of a particular country — the jihadists who brought Islamic fundamentalism to Mindanao, the communists from the former Soviet empire and China who subverted Filipino nationalism. Some were American fellow travelers. Then they may also promote inappropriate technology and its artifacts, which may be useful in highly developed countries but not in a tropical, agriculture-based society like the Philippines. I remember only too well how an electron microscope was donated to the government … but there was no one who knew how to use it.

But most of all, what is welcome yet harmful to a developing nation is it takes away some of the responsibility of nation building from the natives themselves.

At the risk of alienating them, it must be understood that they do not always do good no matter how sincerely or devotedly they work. In the long run, they promote dependency and eventually, a government (or a people) adopts mendicancy as normal, a condition to be encouraged even when that country could harness instead the strength, resources and initiative of its own people.

There is also the real possibility that an NGO may just be a front for the donor’s personal agenda. It is for this reason that India, for instance, does not give blanket permission for foreign NGOs to operate in that vast country. The cultural and ideological baggage that an NGO carries may harm that country itself. As Mahatma Gandhi stated explicitly, he welcomed the “four winds” of the earth into his house but he would not permit any of them to blow his house down.

Given this background, foreign NGOs operating in this country have a lot of freedom.

There are NGOs and then there are NGOs. It is simply disastrous that the Napoles scam, which continues to acquire front-page attention, has demeaned NGOs in general. Sure, it is true that some are phonies and even those that aren’t often have the primary purpose of raising money to strengthen their own bureaucracies and ensure their permanence. In some instances, half of an NGO’s budget goes into its perpetuation rather than as support to the do-gooding program it espouses.

Foreign aid, properly plotted and directed, makes a great difference. In a much broader sense, perhaps the best aid program was the American Marshall Plan for Europe after it was devastated by World War II; the plan hastened the recovery of that continent and made it a viable partner in trade. As that experience abundantly showed, it is the developed countries that have better trade relations with one another. This bodes well for a world that has grown much smaller and more compact because the new communications technologies have made it so.

Unfortunately for us, however, the development of foundations such as those in the United States — the great ones with worldwide programs like Bill Gates’, Ford’s and Rockefeller’s — do not interest our elites. Many of them even think that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) will do when, in fact, it only serves public relations purposes.

I was asked about the diminished interest of government in the agrarian problem. I said we don’t even have food security, that land is a constant that should always be attended to — its ownership, its use, how to maximize agricultural production.

I said that if I were an industrialist or entrepreneur, I would invest in agriculture-based enterprises for there is so much that can be done in manufacturing, in food preservation. Millions of pesos are lost every year due to rat and insect infestation, the absence of drying facilities. The transformation of agricultural lands for commercial purposes, even the age-old problem of land grabbing by the very rich, need to be curbed. Government agricultural workers should leave the comfort of the towns and work in the villages. And if the farms are neglected, it is because farm labor is hard and grueling. How to mechanize it, or lessen the drudgery, is a continuing challenge in agricultural societies.

I was asked about the Catholic Church and its influence. I said that the Catholic Church really has no political power. There is not even a Catholic vote the way there is an Iglesia Ni Cristo vote. Catholicism is taken for granted in a country where it has the biggest membership. And those mammoth Catholic celebrations of the Santo Niño in Cebu, the Virgin in Naga, the Black Nazarene in Quiapo… they draw thousands of devotees, sure, but their attraction is more superstition than religion. The devotees ask favors from the images in these churches.

Spanish colonization in South America differs from ours — the natives there were taught Spanish, the Filipinos were not. The friars learned our native languages so they could preach in them.

I am no expert on South American culture to explain the difference between the peoples of that continent and us. All I know is that the Spaniards encountered in South America established hierarchies, and the advanced civilizations of the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Incas. Up to now, it has not been found out how the Incas, for instance, cut those stones in Machu Picchu that fit so close. How could they have cut them so precisely, without any evidence of superior cutting tools?

The point here is that for foreign aid to succeed, it must consider a people’s history and culture. Otherwise that assistance may not be appreciated.

And finally, a peek into the future. I said that the United States (and its capitalist system) will be the world’s foremost enemy — no, not the Americans as a people, but their seductive principle of unlimited growth as expounded by capitalism. This creed is followed by China, Japan, India, Brazil, and even a laidback country like ours. It is not so much greed as such but the desire to want more, even when that want is already fulfilled. We should build societies — not necessarily prosperous societies — for people can live with simple human needs. What is important is justice. I reminded them of the Club of Rome founded by social thinkers some 40 years ago. It argued for growth to have limits. The club withered and died. This kind of thinking should be resurrected now and should prevail. I am very glad that Pope Francis has called for the reexamination of unfettered capitalism — a radical thought that could reverse the global decline.

Many of the problems caused by poverty are moral at their very core. Filipinos and those agencies who want to help should never forget this.

Among those in the audience at the Australian embassy meeting was Steven Rood, country representative of the Asia Foundation, which has operated in the Philippines for over 50 years. To the best of my knowledge, it was first established in the Philippines in the Fifties. The foundation has no grandiose projects but it has helped hundreds of Filipinos — institutions as well as individuals. I am myself a grateful recipient of such assistance. I hope that in the near future, Malacañang and/or The Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Foundation will recognize the foundation’s contribution to this country.

The foundation is partly supported by the American International Aid program and individuals interested in Asia.

Among the foundation’s representatives, I bring to mind the late Patrick Judge and most of all, Edith Coliver, who was here for almost a decade during the martial law years when her office was a haven to so many who opposed Marcos. Her basic interest then was our justice system, how to make it work better. Such a need still confronts us to this very day.

One of Steve Rood’s interests today is the peace process in Mindanao — I hope that this major obstruction to our development will soon be removed. I am sure that Steve’s concern is much more than what is officially programmed for this blighted country’s future. His wife is the Filipino scholar, the former Lydia Casambre. Like Edith Coliver, Steve is almost Filipino now. –F. Sionil Jose (The Philippine Star)