MY THESIS that the local economy is weak, unsustainable, not pro-poor and not resilient to national and global crisis has been proven right again during Covid pandemic; it is imploding.
It is characterized by its being consumer-driven, dependent on imported goods and technologies, big business controlled retail and utility services, tourist oriented hotel and resort services -- most dependent on contracted local cheap labor.
In one blink of an eye, Covid pandemic has practically wiped them substantially, leaving hundreds if not thousands of local labor forces displaced.
The big businesses survive by cutting on operational costs, employing technology-based services, and keeping high profit.
The locally owned small businesses continue operations and services, keeping a small workforce with same wages and benefits, although their scope and impact is limited.
This reality has gripped us because the local government has pursued bankrupt economic models patterned from and beneficial only for the big businesses who go through cycles of deepening crises.
This is actually the same economic fundamentals of liberalization, deregulation and privatization pursued by the ruling elites and the administration's neoliberal economists and technocrats, under the baton of the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, World Economic Forum and other international trilateral economic and development institutions.
The Philippines, like our micro reality in Bacolod and Negros island, is nothing but a big dumping market of excess goods of big capitalist countries, a dumping ground for all sorts of toxic and genetically modified organism (GMO) products causing numerous deadly diseases and viruses, and source of raw materials and cheap and docile labor. Worse, we have always been dependent on deadly loans and credits, official development assistance, and military support which are filled with political and economic strings attached.
For decades everytime we could not pay our loans, they imposed on us structural adjustment program (SAP) which demanded stringent requirements often surrendering our sovereignty and democracy.
With their Covid designed pandemic, it doesn't need SAP anymore to submit to their impositions and wishes. They simply destroy our economy modeled from their neoliberalism to kneel before them.
On the micro level, the same is unfolding. The big businesses are quickly maneuvering to impose new normals to intensify their control of us while sucking our blood for their insatiable desire for super profits.
Unfortunately, this has been made possible by the problematic micro economic model of the LGU who obviously couldn't make their own development initiatives outside of the dictates of the big businesses operating here.
Unless these economic fundamentals are altered and reoriented, we can't get out of our present morass and the road to perdition.
Yes, only when the local economy is driven by local companies and social entrepreneurs from middle class and basic sectors, reliant on local materials and resources including technologies and equipment, absorptive of local manpower, both skilled and blue collars, and strong mechanisms and safeguards for local circulation of profits or surplus in support of modernizing production and machineries, and all strongly backed up or even led by the LGU - can we be certain to be more vibrant, progressive, solid, sustainable, resilient, and more pliant to national and global crisis.
If the LGU can't do it, I strongly encourage small businesses, social entrepreneurs, CSOs, NGOs and sectoral mass organizations and cooperatives to come together into a caucus or a summit to chart and lay down new economic development models that are inclusive, sustainable, smart, resilient and participatory.
Until then, we can only cry our frustrations and hunger.