BY CHANCE I stumbled on YouTube the state visit of the late President Ferdinand Marcos to the United States on Sept. 16, 1982. In a welcome ceremony at the White House, he told then US President Ronald Reagan that he came “in behalf of the 50 million Filipinos.”
That number was already scary at that time when squatter colonies in Metro Manila were already congested and struggling to survive; and the murky Pasig River, dotted with makeshift shanties, had become too murky for fish to survive.
That number more than doubled 33 years later in 2015, a census year, when the Philippine Statistics Authority reported a total Philippine population of 100,981,437. Today, we are around 106.5 million.
To understand how we have grown by leaps and bounds, the first Philippine census done by Spanish officials in 1591 revealed a population of only 667,612 Filipinos.
The urgency of population control has given birth to the Reproductive Health Law aimed at promoting family planning.
No doubt population congestion, as direct cause of poverty among big families, has forced millions of Filipino laborers to seek greener pasture abroad.
Overpopulation is also a direct cause of the pollution problem besetting urban centers. One example is Manila Bay, from where thousands of tons of garbage were recently extracted.
Another is the long and winding Pasig River that cuts through Metro Manila. Anybody who has been there has seen the murky, almost stagnant water; and has breathed the foulest air around.
I remember having rubbed elbows with swimmers at Manila Bay as a teenager in the 1960s; and having driven my employer’s car full-speed at EDSA much later in 1980.
These days, one must be patient negotiating through the bumper-to-bumper, snail-slow traffic.
The Pasig River may also be cited as proof that lower population density augured well for pollution-free environment. Was there really a time when Pasig River was a natural health spa?
Yes, according to one of my prized possessions, the English translation of the 1853 French book Adventures of a Frenchman in the Philippines by Paul P. de la Gironiere. A chapter in the book cites Pasig River as a health-rejuvenating body of water where rich Spanish, English, Chinese and various mestizos paraded on boats and gondolas.
The author wrote, “The newest and most elegant houses are built upon the banks of the river Pasig. Each house has a landing place from the river and little bamboo palaces serving as bathing houses to which the residents resort several times daily to relieve the fatigue caused by intense heat.”
We can only see the same clean bodies of water today in sparsely populated rural riverbanks.
In the same book, the French author detailed the per-province population of the Philippines according to the 1833 census. The total Philippine population was 3,345,790, of which 285, 039 lived in what is now Metro Manila. The provinces of Iloilo, Capiz (including what is now Aklan) and Antique had 232,055; 115,440; and 78,250, respectively.
I was 10 years old and in grade four in 1960 when my teacher (Mrs. Modesta Calibjo) taught our class 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 59 years!
Our small country is now the 12th biggest in the world.
God forbid that the 106.5 million Filipinos today would triple in another half century when we might have to kill – like lions devouring a prey — or be killed in a mad scramble for food and potable water. (hvego31@gmail.com /PN)
