Sunday, April 20, 2008 Mercado: Shattered forecasts By Juan L. Mercado Sidebar
THAT crash you just heard were population projections that Proclamation 1489 shattered. In this document, President Arroyo reports the census counted 88,574,614 Filipinos as of August last year.
Our first post-war census, in 1948, tallied 19.2 million. By century’s turn, the headcount reported 76.5 million. And now is it 88.5 million? Or are there more really?
Birth rates here declined slower than other Asean countries. Thus, UN projected there’d be 86 million Filipinos by 2010. We crossed that marker three years early.
The Population Commission foresaw a continuing flood of migrants would jack up Cebu ’s population: from 3.5 million, in 2005, to 3.89 million by 2010. With 3.85 million people, Cebu is now the largest province, Sun.Star reports. We’ve breached this benchmark by three years.
Congress funded this census two years late. So, the country navigated by data from previous censuses. “Every 24 hours, 5,800 kids are born,” ex-health undersecretary Mario Tagiwalo explains. “That’s three barangays daily.”
A governor, like Gwen Garcia or a mayor, like Tomas Osmeña, has a tenure of three years. “In that span of time, 6.4 million more babies will be born -- equal to one Western Visayas region,” he adds..
Government expected the 2007 census would show population would reach 90.4 million mark, admits National Economic and Development Authority’s Augusto Santos. The headcount did not. Why?
Misgivings roil demographers, even journalists. Census-takers, in 2007, stumbled into “a high rate of non-response.” Others didn’t make needed visits. “We didn’t enumerate everyone,” admits an official.
Partial enumeration produces fiction of a smaller population. Will flaws, in the 2007 census, permit comparison with the previous censuses? Demographers at UP to Xavier University are now analyzing the results.
The Arroyo regime, meanwhile, reels from criticism by economists like Ateneo’s Cielito Habito and UP’s Felipe Miranda, for primping up family income data. These are “sunshine press releases.” In an issue where 7 out of 10 unplanned pregnancies are aborted, we need controversy like a hole in the head.
“For more than 30 years now, the ‘population debate’ has divided segments of Philippine society,” observes sociologist John Carroll, SJ. The debate has been marred “by mutual suspicions, one-sided arguments and caricatures of opposing positions.
“The outcome has been two groups, each dominated by its more ‘hard-line’ spokespersons,” he writes in A Balancing Act. “(They) talk past each other, without taking time to listen... We must move past the deadlocked debate into an area of respectful discussion…”
Rep. Edcel Lagman sneered at Cebu Catholics as “a bastion of uninformed opposition.” Without analyzing the scientific data, a forum here bucked Lagman’s proposal for a two-child policy. Long on zeal and short of research, a kind priest wrote a column, dismissing demographic studies, by the prestigious San Carlos Office of Population Studies, as “speculation.”
“Procreation and parenthood do not entail a right to have as many children as one desires,” wrote the Cebu-based theologian Fr. Aloysius Cartagena in a op-ed article titled: “Fair Hearing for 2-Child Proposal.”
Cagayan Archbishop Antonio Ledesma SJ notes: Vatican Council documents support responsible family planning. They ask parents to “thoughtfully take into account both their own welfare, and that of their children, those already born and which the future may bring….
“Bad governance, high wealth and income equality and weak economic growth, not just population growth, are causes of poverty,” Dr Ernesto Pernia and 21 other colleagues in the UP School of Economics stress.
But Proclamation 1489 may be of limited help here.
