First, Neda (National Economic and Development Authority) announced in no uncertain terms that a Filipino is not “food-poor” who has P64 for the day’s meals. That amounts to a food budget of P320 per day for a Filipino family of five. That gives a minimum-wage earning poor Filipino family money for food, but not much more for other expenses like clothing, water, gas or electricity, medicines, etc.
The statement Neda released next to calm the waters of negative public reaction only added insult to injury. In the unfeeling manner typical of government bureaucrats, it explained in technical terms how and why they arrived at that figure. A Philippine Statistics agency followed by unapologetically confirming the need to refine the metrics of poverty in this country. Poverty to our bureaucrats is a technical, statistical problem the metrics of which must be done in the most scientific way.
Yet poverty is not a statistic. Poverty is people. The poor are in the best position to define what poverty is and who they are. Some sensitivity must be shown when releasing statistical figures that the poor simply cannot relate to considering the dire reality of their lives. Like, the opposite of “food-poor” is “food-rich.” How frivolous is it of Neda to announce that if you have P64 to spend for the day’s meals you are “food-rich”? Who are they trying to please?
Then came Department of Finance Undersecretary Domini Velasquez, echoing Neda’s hope that the rate of poverty incidence will be single-digit by the end of Marcos’ term. If having P64 makes one not “food-poor,” then poverty incidence might be single-digit even sooner than hoped for. That’s because nothing prevents bureaucrats from giving the impression of a reduced poverty incidence by simply scaling down poverty’s hurdle rate without necessarily improving the lives of the poor.
“Hope is a good word,” says US democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’ wife. But, as she went on to say, “it is not a plan.” If you want your hope to become reality, you must have a plan and work it. It will not just happen. Instead, therefore, of refining the mode of measuring poverty, how about the government tells us what is the country’s plan for a war against poverty.
The fact of the matter is there is no such plan, no defined strategy to speak of for a war against poverty. The nation’s rickety train continues to run on the tracks of a trickle-effect economic system that so far has been wrong to assume that if the sales and profits of rich capitalists are maximized the bigger would be what overflows to the working class. The never-ending ayuda to the poor is proof that the overflow has never been bigger than a trickle.
I am sure this is not the Philippines our national heroes shed their blood for. Which makes it morally imperative for civil society to put the pressure on government to move the nation’s train to a new set of tracks, one that runs towards the economic daylight of equitable distribution of the nation’s wealth for the good of all and not of a few.