Roperos: Poverty and politics

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

THE recent decision of the government to downgrade the official poverty threshold of the country by P6, from P52 to P46, in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) has reportedly worried some observers. Doing so, would increase the number of impoverished individuals in the country, placing the country in the No. 3 position, instead of being “No. 1 in the number of poor people.”

Truth to tell, I think there is a measure of hypocrisy in the effort to change the true poverty status of the Philippines. Meaning, we have lesser impoverished citizens than what we actually have, simply by manipulating the figures in real terms.

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According to the House Committee on Poverty Alleviation, we are really No.1 in Asia, instead of being No. 3, on this aspect.

The downgrading is an obvious politically-motivated move to make the Republic appear in a much better economic circumstances than we really are in the eyes of the United Nations and the rest of the globe. Obviously, the current government’s economic architects cannot seem to stomach the reality of our having the highest number of impoverished people in Asia.

What would happen if we accept the downgrading as a tacit reality of our national condition? We would be living in some sort of social “lie,” pretending to be what we are not just to be able to show the United Nations and our Asian neighbors that we are better off than what we really are, having much lesser poor people than what appears on the UN list as having the most number of impoverished citizenry in Asia.

The government’s move, according to the committee, would also affect “the quality of food of the poor because everything went up including the prices of rice, fish, meat, fares, tuition fees and medicines.” Certainly, by lowering our country’s poverty threshold, it would appear that our government has successfully alleviated in some ways the national condition. Then it would seem that the PNoy government has succeeded with its “war against poverty” and its Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) program.

This is where, I believe, politics figures in the downgrading move. House committee on Poverty Alleviation chair, Rep. Raymond Democrito Mendoza, a party-list lawmaker, pointed out that the CCT program budget in 2011 was only P23 billion. Then this year, the budget went up to P39 billion, and finally, in 2013—which is an election year—the program’s budget leaped to P80 billion to P100 billion. Mendoza considers this amount “as too high and with no exit plan.”

If the downgrading move did not have a touch of politics in it, then why the enormous leap in the CCT program budgetary support in the run-up to the 2013 elections?