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Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Speak out: Poverty and Nature
By Bernie G. Villorente
Datingbayan Foundation Inc.
In our long and uphill fight against rural poverty, the heavy losers have always been our environment, and ourselves. Wanton obliteration of our forests and injudicious exploitation of our coral reefs have created a vicious cycle that points to the inter-related and continuing problems of increasing destitution and environmental degradation.
Much has already been said and written about our deteriorating environment since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring sounded a wake-up call for a complacent world to look at the flip side of the booming years of the sixties.
It is quite clear now that we are starting to pay our debts to Nature, and paying heavily for “compounded interest charges” as seen in recent harrowing disasters in Luzon and the preceding ones that hit Ormoc and Panaon Island in Leyte.
Costs
Our initiatives to reverse to the declining quality of our environment and rural pauperism, we have to admit, cannot be successfully waged without huge financial costs. If ever, we will have to create well-considered options in the form of a more balanced distribution of sustainable and viable wealth-generating vehicles where they matter: our depressed rural areas.
However, the choice of countryside economic pursuits must be architectured for long-term effectivity, with profits equally shared among farmers and fisherfolk, rather than being used to pay for cumbersome non-formal financial and trading services, in order to create a stronger and long-lasting impact on poverty and environment.
The back-to-back onslaught of the recent natural disasters had tolled on our public coffers already reeling from an equally disastrous oil spikes that immeasurably enervate our peso and restrict our financial capacity to underwrite our pro-poor socio-economic agenda. As it stands, a good portion of the 20 percent of the banks’ lending portfolios as mandated by the Agri-Agra Law still being parked in vaults will have to be mobilized to avert rural economic stagnation.
Agricultural growth
Reticence of lending agencies along with their rigid loan processing
requirements generally is perceived as stereotyping farmers and fisherfolk as “unbankable”, and viewed as a skewed policy that tends to stifle agricultural growth. Much of the unpaid loans to small farmers and fisherfolk, we would like to point out, are accumulated because of the bank’s lax supervision and poor monitoring of operational performances.
It also reveals their failure to formulate a sound social preparation designed to foster awareness among borrowers along lines of credit management, or fundamental knowledge on family economics, reflecting a scenario where we have an abundance of helicopters but short of landing pads, so to speak, as educated receiving mechanism.
If our desire is to develop to the hilt our agriculture to benefit the poor, we have to re-think our approaches to the extent of tasking government to plan for profits and aim at bottomlines instead of indulging in expensive consultations, techno-demos and road shows which are investments in a “river of no return”.
Our country’s economic strength still lies in our agricultural
enterprises to solve our nation’s insecure food situation and for generating foreign exchange to beef up our precarious foreign currency reserves. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently said, “IT (information technology) cannot solve poverty”.
(December 28, 2004 issue)
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