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Friday, October 22, 2004
Espinoza: President Arroyo urged to act
By Fred C. Espinoza
POPULATION CONTROL. The country’s big business leaders have written President Gloria Arroyo and called on her to adopt “an active population control policy” to curb population growth, a socially sensitive issue that would put her administration at odds with the dominant Roman Catholic Church.
They warned that 18 million Filipinos were being added to the population every year, outstripping the ability of the country to feed and educate all its people. They even went to the point of warning the President that the problem is hurting the nation’s international competitiveness. But for foreign investors who see the Philippines as a potential investment destination, the problem could even be more serious than the age-old problem of poverty that has compounded the population issue.
If we take into account the latest update on the Philippine business climate by the Wallace Business Forum (WBF), it would take some serious thinking if we want our country to adopt a holistic approach to the dilemma that confronts us all.
Imagine, what the WBF chief Peter Wallace noted first in his survey was that “vested interest rather than national good was dominating government.”
This could be seen as an indictment not only against the government and the business community but more so against society as a whole.
For how could you explain why the rich become richer, and the poor, poorer in a country which is not only rich in natural resources but also blessed with fine weather.
A classic case would be the recent response of the Arroyo administration to the WBF survey update that strongly advocated the improvement of the “sectors of agriculture.” Malacañang is set to issue an executive order that will pave the way for the implementation of the new Agriculture and Fisheries Modernization Act (Afma), which extends the grant of “duty-free import” privileges to the agriculture and fisheries sector until 2015.
I suspect the President and her economic managers may have overlooked the welfare of the marginal fishermen. A group of fisher folk on Wednesday said that even increasing market access for the sector under the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement “would not benefit the three million fisher folk, given the existing economic policies of the government.”
In a forum, Jaime Escobar of the Tambuyog Development Center said unless policies are changed, the economic benefits will be confined only to the exporting agribusiness sector. With the government letting foreign market demand dictate the terms of local fishery production since the late 1970s, market pressures have caused widespread harm to the environment and local communities of small fishers, the group said.
A case in point, the group said, is the widespread conversion by big agribusiness of mangrove areas and coastal fishing grounds into aquaculture farms all over the country in the 1980s and 1990s. It has worsened the poverty of small fishers, Escobar said. The report also noted that with the old Afma, duty-free exemptions were enjoyed by big companies.
(October 22, 2004 issue)
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