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‘With 88
million people, there is already lack of social
services. What more if we double our population?”
That’s
the question asked by University of the Philippines
Population Institute director Dr. Grace Cruz in response
to the 2007 Census of Population conducted by the
National Statistics Office that pegged the Philippine
population at 88.57 million. And though it’s a perfectly
valid question that demands a forthright answer, do not
expect the government to change its stand on the issue.
Acting
Director General Augusto Santos of the National Economic
and Development Authority insists that the government’s
population policies are correct and, therefore, there’s
no need to change them.
Despite
the poor gains in population management—and the dire
prospect that more Filipinos will join the ranks of the
poor, uneducated and malnourished—the Catholic Church
is, likewise, unperturbed.
Catholic
bishops met recently with government officials,
including senators and congressmen, and discussed the
government’s population policy. The bishops urged the
legislators to pass a law that would stop the promotion
of contraceptive use. Archbishop Angel Lagdameo,
Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the
Philippines
president, has said that despite the growing population,
the Church will continue to be “prolife and profamily.”
That’s
the big problem. Apparently, the Church prefers to turn
a blind eye to the direct correlation between runaway
population growth and continuing poverty in this
country. This is not only unfortunate, but even tragic,
considering that the Philippines is a predominantly
Catholic country and the Church exerts a profound
influence on government policy. In fact, according to
experts, our population will double in 35 years if it
continues to grow at 2.04 percent yearly.
The
social costs, of course, will be much greater, with more
children to be educated and more mouths to feed, not to
mention more people to be provided decent shelter.
Take the
case of education. One out of three children of school
age is not in school, one out of three kids drop out of
school and one out of six Filipinos is functionally
illiterate.
This is
the reality here in the Philippines. And this exclusion
from education is more pronounced among marginalized and
disadvantaged Filipinos who miss out because of poverty,
conflict, disability, gender, ethnicity and geographical
location, among other factors, according to
civil-society groups pushing for education reforms.
Then
there’s the current rice crisis in the country that’s
due, in part, to uncontrolled population growth. With
areas planted to rice and other food crops giving way to
cities, factories and biofuel plantations, it is the
poor and the working people who stand to suffer the most
from food shortages and high prices.
Ensuring
adequate food supply—and maintaining social and economic
stability—will not only depend on improving crop
management and postharvest technologies and putting in
more investments in agricultural systems and research
and development, but also on strong political will to
control population growth.
Former
Health secretary Alberto Romualdez chides the government
for giving itself a pat on the back for the 2.04-percent
population growth rate, saying this would still
translate to 100 million Filipinos in five years. The
ideal growth rate, he adds, should only be 1 percent or
1.5 percent a year.
“If we
are able to achieve that, then government can honestly
claim that it has done something to address the problem
for the good of our country.”
The
population would continue to expand rapidly, he asserts,
unless the government stood up to the Catholic Church
and implemented a vigorous family-planning program.
The same
view is taken by the Forum for Family Planning and
Development Inc., which also calls on the government to
implement a stringent and long-term population program
and for the Catholic clergy to soften their opposition
to artificial birth-control methods. It points out that
millions of Filipinos suffer from poverty due to large
and unplanned families, and “unless we give priority to
the problem of ballooning population, every effort to
counter poverty would be pointless.”
The
increasing population will only undermine the efforts of
the government to bring about economic development,
especially in the countryside, it adds.
Indeed,
the government should rethink its existing population
policy focused solely on natural family-planning
methods. Reproductive-health groups have been pushing
the government to supply poor communities with
contraceptives, including birth pills and condoms, but
the Church seems to have successfully parried these
moves.
Last
year Congress approved the release of P180 million for
the government’s reproductive-health programs. But the
fund, which is supposed to be allotted for the
government’s health units and local government units for
the distribution of contraceptives to the poor, has not
been released. The reason for this, according to the
Philippine Legislators’ Committee on Population and
Development Foundation Inc., is that the Church could be
exerting pressure on the government not to distribute
the fund.
While
the Department of Health (DOH) says the money is already
included in the 2008 Special Allotment Release Order
and, therefore, will soon be released, it will be used
primarily for the DOH Women’s Health Division’s campaign
to bring down the maternal and newborn mortality rate.
On the
urgent issue of population control, therefore, the
government and the Catholic Church are clearly part of
the problem, though this is not to say population growth
alone exacerbates our resource constraints. Still, they
can be part of the solution, if they want to. As things
now stand, neither wants to take the first step in
curbing population growth. And that’s the unkindest cut
of all, because it not only makes us extremely
vulnerable to food crises, such as the one that we have
now, it also tends to perpetuate the same cycle of
poverty that we have not been able to lick for a long,
long time. |
