By HERBERT VEGO
THE last time I talked to Iloilo provincial population officer Ramon Yee, he estimated that Philippine population had already hit 100 million. In the last six years, we have held on to our reputation as the 12th most populous nation on earth. We have advanced two steps since 1998 when we were 14th with 75.3 million.
If our growth rate stays at 2.3 percent annually, our population would rise to 118 million by 2025.
Nevertheless the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) insists, “Population is not the problem. It’s the great disparity of wealth. If the wealthy would share what they have, then population would not be a problem.”
Although I have written about the population problem many times, I am tempted to do it again in firm belief that while it may not be “the problem,” it is a problem nevertheless.
It is a problem ignored by the Roman Catholic Church which condemns artificial family planning as “pro-abortion, anti-life.”
No less than Jaro Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, past president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP), has preached, “The social doctrine of the Church challenges society and government to regard population not as mere consumer but also to help and facilitate their becoming producers and formal businessmen.”
Monsignor Hernando Carbonel has called population explosion “a myth.”
That wistful thinking is easier said than done and is a myopic way of defending an undesirable situation where a poor couple makes more children than they can afford to feed and send to school in order to survive. More often than not, the cycle replicates itself in the next generation.
Doesn’t even common sense tell us that a worker making barely enough bread for himself is unfit to marry and multiply? The new family consequently becomes a burden, not an asset, to society.
In the book, “Hey Joe”, a collection of Asian travel stories, American author Ted Lerner relates the plight of Nina, an unwed 30-year-old mother of 10 children who migrates from Bacolod City to Angeles City, ending up as paramour of an American serviceman.
“Almost anywhere one travels in the Philippines,” Lerner writes, “you could
select women at random and you’d likely hear similar stories.”
Conversely and ironically, it is the rich in the Philippines who limit the number of their children to two or three to ensure their good future. That probably explains why only 10 percent of Filipinos are believed in control of 90 percent of the nation’s wealth; and 90 percent survive on 10 percnt of its wealth.
Ironically, other predominantly Catholic countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Poland control their birth rates despite the clergy’s admonition to the faithful to refrain from using church-banned contraceptives.
I was 10 years old and in grade four in 1960 when I first learned that the Philippines had a population of 30 million. This means that, between 1960 and today, the aforesaid population that took centuries to accumulate has more than tripled in only a half century!
Thailand, on the other hand, which had about as many people as the Philippines in 1960, has only doubled its population. Predominantly Buddhist, Thailand has an active population management.
The Thais must have used their bigger heads; ours, the smaller ones./PN
