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The growth figures do not matter much.
Whether it is at a high of seven percent or a
moderate growth level of five percent, still the sad fact of our
economic life remains this: a jobless, mirthless growth.
The rich, who own almost everything in the
country, suck up the choice cuts of that growth and only morsels
trickle down into the hamlets of rural poverty and urban slums. The
bracket of the rich is shorter than your usual wine list. It has
been a static list. Very few names changed in a century.
Even if the huge wealth is held by a few
families, there would be not much problem with that if the money is
plowed back into the mainstream as job-generating investments, a
portfolio with a social, egalitarian purpose like industry and
manufacturing. And rural investments. But no, that has never been
the case.
The money is invested back into banks and
financial services, energy, shopping malls telecoms, the sectors
that do not open up new jobs and inject dynamism into the economic
mainstream.
The poor is now a desperate mass of close to 50
million people. And growing everyday.
As if the great disparity were not enough, the
current data on overseas remittances from our workers come crashing
to us like a sledgehammer.
It said that a sizable portion of the $15
billion or so yearly remittances from Filipinos overseas does not
trickle down into poor urban and rural communities. Because that
portion comes from well-heeled professionals in North America
(doctors, fund managers, Silicon Valley nerds) who tell their real
estate agents and investment advisers where to use the money.
The stocks, club shares and condos that are
purchased with the remittances hardly help in easing massive
poverty. A P15-million condo unit gives one cleaner a job. A
P15-million wise investment in the countryside can put up 10
start-up piggeries (each with a small hammer mill for feedmaking)
for 10 families.
The final destination of the remittances from
North America is something unlike our notion of overseas
remittances, which is a huge money pool that is substantially
devoted to energizing small and medium-scale enterprises based in
the barrios.
All along, we had this grand idea that much of
that money from overseas is for education and small-time and
small-scale investments on a massive scale, which are the surest way
of busting poverty.
With these dismal realities, even a double-digit
growth rate will remain impotent in the fight against poverty.
The great disconnect between our
moderate-to-high statistical growth and the harsh realities of
massive poverty at ground level has gone through dissections and
analyses without letup. Economists of all stripes and persuasions
have put forward their great and not-so-great views on the issue.
Yet, of these thousand ideas, not one has yet to
fully bloom to help chart the roadmap to effectively transform
statistical growth into practical poverty-busting programs.
Micro-financing, the darling action plan of the moment, is at best a
palliative. The 80 to 90-percent repayment of micro-financing loans
is illusory. The poor borrowers do a primitive form of kiting to
settle accounts due.
The “final solution” to the great disconnect
will have to come from the resurrection of a discredited program,
the supervised food production program of Marcos. With fiscal
restraints and some modifications, the government and the private
sector can team up to revive the slew of programs that came with the
Green Revolution: Masagana 99, Maisan etc.
Cheap production loans made possible through a
generous lending window from the Bangko Sentral, a decent farm
infrastructure, agricultural extension workers rendering adequate
technical support, a network of farm suppliers and a dedicated cadre
of program overseers can energize food production activities in the
countryside.
With much of the world starving for rice and
basic food supplies, there is a global market to be filled. We just
have to produce enough for national consumption and an extra volume
for the export market.
All that awesome and wondrous productive energy
that was unleashed in the countryside in the late 60s and early 70s
will be making a comeback. The sum of that work was the Green
Revolution. For the post-Green Revolution babies, the program
was the brainchild of an organization and management genius—the
late Rafael Salas. It devoted people, resources and programming
expertise to boost agricultural production. And it worked.
Of the dozens of young men and women who got
involved in the program, we can recall two: Sen. Edgardo J. Angara ,
then a young corporate lawyer, and Domingo Panganiban, then a young
agronomist. Both became secretary of agriculture.
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