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ON the
day that this paper made as its banner story the
revelation by Budget Secretary Rolando Andaya Jr. that
the government plans to revive a controversial
P1-billion fund for barangays—shot down just before the
last elections for its suspect timing—the governor of
beleaguered Isabela province, Mary Grace Padaca, was
interviewed over dwIZ’s Karambola, where she made
a thought-provoking observation.
When her
hosts sounded tentative when she described how what used
to be creeping hunger had now spread widely throughout
her province as a result of the long dry spell—only
recently broken by rains—the governor made a comparison
between wet and dry disasters.
It’s so
much quicker to get response and assistance from people,
she said, when a calamity is of the wet kind—meaning,
there are floods everywhere, and the visuals are far
easier to appreciate, i.e., of folk squatting on
rooftops or shivering on riverbanks.
But the
“calamity” triggered by
Luzon’s long dry spell this year is something else. It takes a
while before people’s attention can be drawn to the
sight of sunburned farmers or their families who have
had no food to eat for many months. They’re still as
sunburned as before and are mostly thin because they do
physical work, so it’s quite difficult to see that
they’ve gone from just naturally thin to gaunt and
extremely hungry, unless their eyes begin to pop out or
their children’s limbs are so reed-thin they can barely
carry their bodies, as in some UN calendar of famine in
Africa.
To be
sure, the good governor apparently had no intention of
playing down the impact of the tragedy now
visiting—again—some villages in Central Luzon, which
have been revisited by floods these past two weeks after
the long dry spell. But she did have a point about human
tragedy sometimes taking on such quiet, unsensational
forms that they get overlooked by authorities and
policymakers.
Which
brings us to the point of poverty alleviation, about
which the national government has been talking about of
late.
The
first point that it should remember—and this goes as
well for all do-gooders, even in the private sector—is
that poverty has many forms, not just in terms of meager
incomes. State economists are the ones who always like
to use terms as “food-poor” or “access-poor” or
“asset-poor” or “social-security poor.”
Given
this, the government should, thus, be the first to make
sure it doesn’t pour in scarce resources into programs
and interventions that tend to have a shotgun approach.
There may be enclaves of the poor, both in the cities
and the countryside, where simply dispensing cash, as
happens during election campaigns, is not the solution
to poverty.
In some
areas, the greater emergency may lie in poor nutrition
or educational status of children. An intensive,
focused, school-based feeding program may thus be the
better solution.
In
others, a program such as that encouraged by the World
Bank and reported on earlier this week, may be the
better response, i.e., the Bank pays certain poor
families in strategically targeted areas to send their
children to school, instead of using them for cheap or
unpaid labor. The payment covers the income that
otherwise could be derived from them.
This
kind of logic might apply, for instance, to urban-poor
communities near Manila Bay, whose children are made to
wade through filthy waters for four to six hours each
day to salvage junk that recyclers might still wish to
buy. On average, each child earns from P10 to a high of
P20 a day from the recyclers—but the exchange is
horrendous: the child’s education.
Though a
few go to public schools, most of them, said a recent TV
docu, have dropped out because they are either so
exhausted—not to mention slowly being killed by the
toxins in the heavily polluted water—that they don’t
have the energy for school, or can’t stand being called
“anak ng basura” or even more derogatory labels.
And then
again, the face of poverty may be replaced with the face
of human dignity simply by helping some informal
settlers (the politically correct term for squatters)
get titles to the sites they have long been occupying,
especially in government property or private estates
that can qualify for expropriation.
In
recent years, some of the more forward-looking state
agencies have actually displayed a genuine propoor
orientation by simply overhauling their services,
through technology, so that the masses who need
them—say, for vital documents like birth certificates
for passports, or NBI and police clearances, or IDs,
such as for SSS and GSIS—won’t be spending so much time
and money going to the offices.
In some
cases, poor people with just the right skills might be
helped with some means of organizing and accreditation,
and a referral system that links them up with people who
need their services, as a young, idealistic couple did
in a big subdivision south of Manila—the plumbers,
electricians and repairmen of everything from watches to
umbrellas in the area now have their own IDs and a
directory that homeowners can consult to reach them.
At the
end of the day, all it takes to reckon with the many
faces of poverty may simply boil down to technology,
just a little creativity, and of course, reliance on a
very focused and competent research or needs-assessment
unit.
Throw in
the all-important factor as well, of insulation from
politics. The last comes to mind in light of recent
reports of a move to change the composition of the
National Antipoverty Council with the net effect
of—which government will deny for sure—purging the
Left-leaning sectors. So, if the government really has
the best intentions in reviving the P1-billion Kalayaan
Barangay or the P4-billion Kilos Asenso programs, it
might bear this in mind.
Above
all, the insight of Grace Padaca is most crucial: the
most urgent needs are often the most silent. |
