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By Paul M. Icamina, Special Reports Editor
LESS food on the table awaits the nation as the number of Filipinos
double in the next 30 years – from 90 million now to 180 million.
That’s why the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act
must be passed.
The shortage of classrooms, scarcity of decent
and affordable housing and scant health care will be more
pronounced, demographers warn.
“At the current growth rate of 1.95 percent,
the population will double in 36 years,” said Felicitas Rexhon,
director of the Philippine Center for Population and Development.
The 30 years it takes to double the population
“is the time we need for our institutions and resources to develop
and meet the requirements of the future,” Rexhon said. “As it
is, income and services don’t match the requirements of population
growth.”
Four Filipinos are born each minute, she pointed
out. At this rate, nearly 103 million Filipinos by 2015 will demand
living standards that are currently already cramped.
“Millions of Filipinos will be financially
strapped with more children wanting food, shelter and education,”
she said. “The sadder story is, more children are born to poor
families.”
High fertility, among others, results from the
unmet needs of the poor—they have two children more than
desired—primarily due to lack of information and access to
effective family planning, Rexhon argued.
If the government fails to provide them the
needed services now, total fertility would remain high and will
consequently lower the well-being of the poor, she said, adding this
worsens poverty.
Not all is lost, as the population growth rate
is actually going down, she said, from 2.36 percent in 2000 to 2.04
in the last 2007 census. The target is 1.9 percent by 2010, which is
attainable, Rexhon points out, adding “there is a gradual decline
but we are aiming for a bigger rate of decline.”
Scarcity
The scarier prospect that should spur population
“management,” the term demographers now deem more politically
correct than population control, is the likelihood of not having
enough rice on the plate.
“Rice production has lagged behind the
population growth rate in the Philippines,” said Dr. V. Bruce
Tolentino, an expert in rice economics. “In Malthusian terms, rice
production lost the race with population.”
“Stagnant growth in rice production, combined
with rapid population growth, explains why the country has lost its
self-sufficiency in rice.”
The Philippines is now the biggest customer for
Vietnam’s rice exports and a regular recipient of subsidized rice
loan from the United States. Still, rice retails at prices three
times higher than in Vietnam and Thailand.
Since rice is expensive, Filipinos consume less
of the staple than most other countries of similar levels of income
and economic development, said Tolentino, a professor at the Asian
Institute of Management, University of the Philippines School of
Economics and the Ateneo School of Government.
Rice consumption is 95 kilograms per Filipino
per year while it is 150 kilogram in Bangladesh, 160 kilogram in
Cambodia, 149 kilogram in Indonesia, 172 kilogram in Laos and 213
kilogram in Myanmar.
Expensive rice over the past decade helps
“explain worsening nutrition, especially among the very young,”
Tolentino pointed out. The number of underweight Filipino children
rose from 8.2 percent in 1993 to 9.2 percent in 1998.
Putting a roof over the heads of one of
Southeast Asia’s most populous nation is a challenge. The
government estimates that 3.36 million houses are needed from 1999
to 2004, of which 2.22 million are allotted for future population
growth and 1.14 million units for the housing backlog.
The numbers are dismal. According to Zorayda
Alonzo, former head of the Pag-IBIG housing fund, “the performance
of government reveals that it can only address up to 40 percent of
the country’s housing needs due to resource limitations.”
Housing, for example, gets only 1 percent of the national budget.
“The nation’s housing shortage is expected
to grow with the continued increase in population,” she warned.
Increasing population also affects the
intellect. The slow decline in fertility and population growth has
meant the rapid growth of the school-age population, but the
government response is inadequate.
Said Dr. Alejandro Herrin, a professor at the UP
School of Economics: “Only 67 percent of elementary school pupils
finish Grade 6 and only 75 percent finish high school.” The low
quality of education is reflected in the poor performance of
students in standardized tests, he says.
Students fare poorly for all subjects in the
National Elementary Assessment Test and the National Secondary
Assessment Test, with mean scores of 50 percent. If 75 percent is
considered passing, students on average were only learning
two-thirds of what was expected of them, Herrin said.
“These quality indicators suggest that the
expansion of [education] to accommodate the rapid growth of the
school-age population was less than adequate to achieve and maintain
high survival rates and student performance,” Tolentino said.
“Slowing down population growth could have
potentially large beneficial impact on educational performance,”
he added.
Ernesto Pernia of the UP School of Economics
pointed out that average annual spending on education per student
falls from P5,558 for a one-child family to P682 for a family with
nine or more children.
Average health spending per capital drops
correspondingly, from P1,700 to P150, he added.
Rising population has dire health consequences.
“Having too many and too closely spaced children raises the risk
of illness and premature deaths, for mother and child alike,”
Pernia said. “Ten women die daily owing to pregnancy and causes
associated with childbirth. Many unwanted pregnancies result in
induced and illegal abortions, numbering nearly half a million
annually.”
The health risks associated with unwanted
pregnancies are higher for adolescent mothers as they are more
likely to have complications during labor, he says, adding that
almost a fourth of uneducated teenagers have already begun
childbearing compared with only 3 percent of those who have attended
college.
Limits
Already strained government resources are
stretched to the limits with more people to provide services for.
One way to look at government resources and population is to
consider total per capita government spending from 1975 to 1999,
according to Mario Taguiwalo, a consultant for the departments of
health and education and the United Nations.
“At less than P10,000 per Filipino per year,
government spending is severely inadequate for a poor Filipino
household that requires subsidized basic health, education,
protection against crimes and participation in essential duties of
citizenship,” he said.
If the Philippines succeeded in reducing
unwanted fertility starting in 1975, the 1999 population should have
been 25 percent less than it was. Even while government expenditure
remained at the same level, the resulting average per capita
spending per Filipino could have been increased to P12,238, or about
30 percent more than average actual per capital spending in 1999.
“Population growth was not significantly
reduced to enable the economy and the government to get ahead and
invest at levels higher than the demands of current consumption,”
Taguiwalo said.
Already, the state’s poor record in taxing and
mobilizing resources has a negative impact on a rapidly growing
population. According to the UP School of Economics, spending on
social services has “chronically suffered,” owing largely to
poor revenue collection; government’s tax collection amounts to
only 14 percent of the gross national product.
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