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[av_heading heading=’Criminal neglect’ tag=’h3′ style=’blockquote modern-quote’ size=” subheading_active=’subheading_below’ subheading_size=’15’ padding=’10’ color=” custom_font=”][/av_heading]
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ACTIVISTS from the Visayas (Western, Central and Eastern) are trooping to Manila, the nation’s capital, to demand an end to hunger, homelessness, and militarization in their lands. They are urging the Duterte administration to prioritize and address widespread hunger, lack of livelihood, failed resettlement, and lack of sufficient and prompt assistance for disaster victims in housing and agriculture. These are actually problems left behind by the Aquino administration.
The people of Visayas continue to experience hunger with slow, little or no help at all from the government since 2013 when super typhoon “Yolanda” struck. The government should redirect its thrusts on disaster resettlement and reconstruction because three years after “Yolanda” and other major disasters which followed it, we see heightening poverty, reduced yield of farmers, uprooting of entire communities away from their sources of livelihood, to name a few.
There is hunger and joblessness in the regions largely due to slow reconstruction of industries, particularly agriculture. Peasant farmers who feed the nation are unable to put food on their own tables and their children are unable to go to school. Especially in hardest-hit Eastern Visayas, there are still no decent jobs to be found and entire fields have gone bare due to the successive disasters and pests.
People Surge, the group of disaster survivors, estimates that copra production was cut by 75 percent to 90 percent, thereby reducing farmers’ income to 50 percent up to 90 percent.
The government must consider the homes and livelihood of people in implementing resettlement programs. It should ensure that resettlement enables people to live in resilient sites and strong structures and not take them far away from where they get their food and livelihood.
Since “Yolanda”, the promised aid has yet to fully reach intended beneficiaries. Among these are the aid for housing repair and reconstruction from the President’s Social Fund and the Emergency Shelter Assistance for government employees, including thousands of public school teachers and employees, and indigents, respectively. Assistance and subsidies for seedlings, fertilizer, and farm machinery and services are either delayed by bureaucratic procedure, pocketed, or given to the beneficiaries for a price.
The immediate and complete release of the housing repair and agriculture assistance as well as investigations by the relevant agencies into the delay and denial of aid and subsidies must be in order. These are matters of life and death; the criminal neglect should not happen again.
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