FIGHTING POVERTY

I recall that the turning point in America’s “war” against environmental decay came when the entire American nation saw the Ohio River burn in broad daylight on national television. The sight was horrifying enough to “wake up” everybody from their long slumber of apathy and negligence as far as their environment was concerned. The rest was history after that, because from then on, everything was set right in their environmental efforts, and there was no more need for them to “wake up” again, as they never “slept” on the problem again.

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Here in the Philippines, poverty is nothing new in the sense that we have known about it for a long time, except that we were still “shocked” when we saw the face of poverty stare at us when it took the form of angry mobs that roamed the streets in the aftermath of EDSA III. At that time, I thought that the whole country would turn around, and finally pay attention to the problem of poverty that has hounded us for many decades. Much to my disappointment however, all the outrage at that time just turned out to be “ningas cogon”, as practically everyone forgot about it in a short while.

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As I see it, there are many more poor people now compared to the actual numbers during the time of EDSA III, and the surveys actually say so. The report that 74 people died in one accident all at once has shocked us, but has it occurred to you that our present mortality rate may actually be drastically affected already by the high incidence of hunger and poverty right now? Thank goodness that famine has not yet struck in this country, but I have reason to believe that people may already be dying from starvation as an indirect or direct cause.

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What does the government mean when it says that it is going to “wage a war” against poverty? Does it mean poverty reduction or poverty alleviation? Given the fact that it does not have clear poverty reduction targets, we could only speculate that it probably means poverty alleviation only. If that is so, we should really not expect much from the government, because “alleviation” is no better than a pain reliever that is given to a sick man who actually needs surgery.

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Using only our common sense, it would not be difficult to figure out that a reduction in the unemployment rate would have a direct impact on the poverty rate. Common sense not being too common nowadays, we could only hope that the government would see the connection between these two economic measures, apart from realizing that poverty alleviation and poverty reduction are two distinct concepts. With these two realizations, we could only hope that it will focus on actually reducing the unemployment rate, instead of giving us meaningless “anti-poverty” fantasies.

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If the government is really serious about addressing the poverty problem in this country, it should start with the revamp of our entire process of counting the number of poor people in this country. Known as the “poverty rate”, this is an economic measure that has become obsolete and is no longer a reliable indicator for reading our real poverty picture. As far as I know, it has been many years since the prices of the basic commodities in the so-called “imaginary food basket” were reviewed and updated. To cut a long story short, the prices of these commodities must have gone up so high now, such that many people could no longer afford the “basket”, thus putting them below the poverty line.

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Aside from the obsolete methodology, the method of data collection in measuring the poverty rate is also faulty, because the information is not collected from below, from the community level. Right now, the data is collected by the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) from various sources, but apparently without the participation of the provincial governments. If it has to be done properly, the data has to be collected by the Provinces, and uploaded to the national level, instead of the other way around.

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Setting aside the question of whether federalism is good or not, I am now advocating “provincialism”, a term that I coined to refer to the approach of strengthening good governance at the provincial level. Setting aside also the issue of money, there are many opportunities to improve the quality of life in the Provinces, without spending so much money. If you know of any provincial official who is interested in “provincialism”, please contact me. To start with, I have a number of software programs that could be donated to them already. I have been giving away software for many years now.