CAUSE-ORIENTED groups in Eastern Visayas converged in Tacloban City's main streets on Monday, July 23, for a protest march against President Rodrigo Duterte in time for his third State of the Nation Address (Sona).
In series of speeches before setting Duterte's effigy on fire, the activist leaders detailed the alleged "crime list" of Duterte in the region. The list covers the issues of "hunger, poverty, and fascism."
"How can the Duterte administration expect to attain food security for a region whose agriculture sector they obviously abandoned?" asked Mira Legion, chairperson of AnakBayan-Eastern Visayas.
"With thousands of hectares worth of agricultural lands converted to suit export demands, the National Economic and Development Authority was left with no choice but to pin the blame on other sectors who wanted to re-prioritize agriculture production for exports, denying the fact that crop conversion is part of the national all-out liberalization thrusts of the Duterte government," she added in an earlier statement.
Legion said that in Leyte, "close to 10,000 hectares of rice fields have already been converted for other purposes and in Northern Samar, cocoa production rose at the expense of other traditional crops."
"This while in December of 2017, government buffer supply stocks for National Food Authority rice were already running out amid the Department of Agriculture's own objective of achieving 150 percent rice sufficiency for the entire region," the youth leader said.
On poverty issue, Legion said that "3 out of 10 families are considered poor."
Citing government data, the leader said that regional poverty incidence rate is at 30.7 percent.
"But even if these figures are in themselves alarming, due to the poverty threshold being pegged at P60 a day, thousands of people are unjustly categorized as above the poverty threshold," she added.
According to Legion, sugar workers in Eastern Visayas-based haciendas "are working at illegal rates of P150 to P200 a day while being allowed to only work for 12 days in a month."
"The Philippine Statistical Authority, meanwhile, boasts of a regional employment rate of 95.6 percent, an unrealistic figure that doesn't reflect the massive economic displacement brought about by militarization in all provinces of the region and the reorganization of economic thrusts from agriculture-intensive to service sector oriented," she said.
Almost five years since Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) devastated the region, Legion said post-calamity permanent housing units have yet to be finished.
"Officially, the National Housing Authority has announced that the target date for completing Yolanda-related housing projects is still in 2019. Above it all, relocatees are forced to suffer waist-deep flooding and extreme heat in the new relocation sites," she said.
The progressive groups also reported that the region had "over 40 victims of extra-judicial killings" under the President's anti-drug campaign, aside from the alleged "militarization" in the countryside.
Meanwhile, Duterte, in his speech, maintained his administration's accomplishments in the past 12 months.
Citing the Social Weather Stations' second-quarter survey on self rated poverty as basis, Malacañang said it takes "seriously the June 2018 survey, which shows an increase in the incidence of families who consider themselves as poor, as well as families rating themselves as food-poor."
"As government reported earlier this month when June inflation numbers were announced, families felt the pinch of higher food prices, particularly the accelerated increase in the price of rice during the survey period, due primarily to weather-related delays in distribution of cheap imports. Rice inflation consistently picked up from one percent in January to 4.7 percent in June this year," the Palace said in a statement.
"We are putting in place long-term solutions to significantly reduce inflation and help poor Filipino families, such as pushing for rice tariffication as rice accounts for around 20 percent of the total consumption of the poor and implementing our Build, Build, Build program to lower the transport cost of food and goods," it added.
Malacañang maintained that timing of the survey, June 27-30, must also be considered.
"[The] government, through the Department of Social Welfare and Development, had distributed Unconditional Cash Transfers to around 3.8 million of the 10 million total beneficiaries at the time of the survey, with distribution ramping up quickly subsequently, while the Department of Transportation's Pantawid Pasada Program for jeepney operators with valid franchises started this July," it said. (SunStar Philippines)