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Wednesday, November 03, 2004
Competition, jobs to feed Filipinos
THE way to fill the stomachs of millions of hungry Filipinos is to support entrepreneurship, create jobs and encourage competition to drive consumer prices down, according to business executives.
Increasing the wages of those already employed could also help, an economist added.
“We should create jobs by making the economy really work better,” said Robert Go, president of the Cebu Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
He also advocated the opening of businesses to drive food prices down.
“Why is Cebu’s merchandise the cheapest in the Philippines?” he asked Sun.Star.
“A can of milk is cheapest in Cebu, compared to Cagayan de Oro, Manila and anywhere else.
When it comes to groceries, Cebu is cheaper even than Bohol or Minda-nao,” said Go, who owns retailing company Prince Warehouse Club.
He attributed this to the proliferation of supermarkets in the province, triggering a price war.
Go, also co-chairman of the Regional Development Council 7, was reacting to an August survey revealing that 15 percent of Filipino households had had nothing to eat at least once in the last three months.
Go said prices in Cebu were low even if its “rice is imported from Iloilo, corn from Caga-yan de Oro, beef probably from Mindanao, vegetables from Manila and Baguio, and sardines from General Santos.”
Antonio Pineda, president of the Cebu Business Club and general manager of Isuzu Cebu Inc., suggested “giving support to the entrepreneurial spirit.”
He added that urban areas should be decongested and development moved to other areas in the
country.
Dr. Oscar Bucog, faculty member of the University of San Carlos Department of Economics, said increasing wages could also give consumers more purchasing power.
Wage hike
He asked the business sector not to resist so much the wage increase demands of labor, saying their revenues would also suffer if the consumers could not afford to buy their products.
But Bucog also cautioned labor against seeking across-the-board wage hikes, saying some sectors were not capable of giving the increases.
He also warned of the ill effects of the shift in employment trends since the mid-1980s, making the service sector the main employer in the country, instead of agriculture and industry.
“Services is not as productive a sector as agriculture and industry in terms of value-added products. This is the reason why the productivity of the Filipino worker is getting lower in the aggregate. This is due to the shift to services from agriculture without industrialization,” he said.
Bucog advocates linking agriculture with industries, so the former can provide the inputs needed by the latter. This will reduce the need to use foreign exchange to import inputs. (CTL)
(November 3, 2004 issue)
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