Poverty is never fun

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BY HERBERT VEGO
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Tuesday, October 10, 2017
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INTERVIEWED on radio yesterday, the president of a jeepney drivers’ association stressed “inability to make both ends meet” as ground for their demand to raise minimum fare from P6.50 to P10.

I can only half-agree. Yes, the drivers – like many other laborers who toil for a living for the survival of their families – are cogs in the economic wheel.

But no, increasing fare that much would trigger “domino effect” – triggering rising prices of prime commodities. Have we not learned from experience?

The answer to poverty is not inflation of the Philippine peso. What we need is sustainable economic productivity that would trickle economic growth down to the poorest of the poor.  It is essential to the survival of 103 million Filipinos

Unfortunately, the development of our economy has lagged behind our population growth. While the economy is said to have grown by 6.5 percent in the second quarter of 2017, the poorest of the poor still could not afford three square meals a day.

It is said that 90 percent of the country’s wealth is in the hands of only 10 percent of the people. Worse, most poor Filipino parents wallow in the mistaken notion that the more babies they make, the more they contribute to productivity. This belief is prevalent among farmers who expect their children to take over farm work.

No doubt our country is rich in natural resources. We grow rice, sugar cane, pineapples, bananas, and coconuts, among others. Our seas throb with fishes. But have we maximized utilization of these natural resources?

Unfortunately, we have mishandled our natural resources! Massive deforestation has killed our lumber industry. The young generation, incidentally, don’t know that in the 1950s, industrial logging was legal.

A better alternative would have been to strike a balance between income and consumption. An ideal family must only beget as many children as they can feed, clothe and send to school. A good education will assure them of better opportunities for success. Failure to do this would condemn future generations to a vicious cycle of poverty.

Slowly but surely, on the positive side, our entrepreneurs are learning to exploit our natural resources to the hilt. The Guimaras, mango, for example, has a huge export market in Australia. Dried ripe mangoes, done in Cebu, are available in duty-free airport shops everywhere.

We have creative professionals in the arts and sciences – say painting, writing, sculpting, cooking, gardening, sewing, playing instruments, dancing, singing, nursing, care-giving, among others – but there’s not enough local environment for them to bloom.

We have to “export” labor due to lack of local opportunities. More than 11 million Filipinos now live and work abroad to keep their dependents in the motherland alive. Never before until today have we seen mass migration of Filipino nurses lured by the opportunity to earn dollars.

Those who remain at home have no choice but suffer starvation wages in local hospitals or, worse, work as “volunteers” in the hope of gaining experience that would qualify them for future employment.

The less fortunate Filipinos today seem to have leaped out of Jose Rizal’s essay, “The Indolence of the Filipinos,” a paragraph in which said:

“All the Filipinos, as well as those who have tried to engage in business in the Philippines, know how many documents, what errands, how many stamped papers, how many ordeals of patience are needed to secure from the government business permit for an enterprise. A person must count upon the goodwill of this official, on the influence of that one, on a good bribe to another, so that the application may not be pigeonholed, a present to the one further on so that he may pass the matter on to his chief.” (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
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