Editorial: The politics of poverty

THIS country, so government statistics say, has its number of poor citizenry–families of five members with a monthly income of just P1,200—rise to some 27.60 million in 2006 from just 25.47 million in 2001, or a period of just five years. In more recent times, a government economist said, the incidence of hunger among the poor Filipinos had almost doubled during the period 2000 to just last year, 2009, from 11.4 percent to 20.3 percent.

The group of Filipinos earning an equivalent of less than a dollar daily considered the poverty threshold as viewed by the World Bank was one-third of the 90 million people. These are the people that have now become the bone of contention by the current crop of politicians and would-be politicians who are now pouring cash into radio and television commercials in the run-up to the May presidential elections.

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The problem here is that while this republic’s economy is being viewed as one that has considerably developed and expanded in recent months—the average domestic product growth rate is 5.3 percent—yet poverty has persisted, as evidenced by the rise of poor families from 8.6 million to 9.4 million. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), in its 2008 study, said poverty here is “predominantly rural, affecting 75 percent of population.”

The ADB has placed the blame on “decades-long problems in agriculture, where growth has not been sustained or on a host of reasons not the least of which is an utter lack of investments amidst a setting of a booming population. There is little access, if any, for the rural folk to investment loans so agrarian reform beneficiaries could till the land they are now able to own. In a sense, agrarian reform has not eased poverty.

In fact, it is said that the country’s 21-year-old agrarian reform program is being “opposed by wealthy landowners,” which means that the potential success of the greatly desired agrarian reforms has become dependent on the help of wealthy folks.

After all, the politics of the country, in the first place, is generally in the hands of the wealthy middle class and the elite families. Thus, the rural poor have always been political orphans in their struggle to extricate themselves from the morass of poverty.

The ADB, in its assessment, which is “shared by Filipino academics and economists,” says that the Philippines has made little inroads in easing the number of poor Filipinos, blaming it on the failure of the economy to grow rapidly and to generate quality employment.” A government economist says the Arroyo government boasts of having had the highest GDP average growth rate of 4.4 percent among RP presidents since 1966.

Yet, the “windfall earnings have been enjoyed entirely by the country’s richest corporations and families.” Gross domestic product (GDP) is the value of the goods produced and services rendered in a particular country in a given period. But the overall impact of this reality to the national condition has not filtered down to the lower levels of the population, and the hunger of the nation’s poor has instead increased and intensified.