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“Migration can be a climb up the income ladder for
well-prepared, skilled workers, or it can be a simple
displacement of poverty to the urban environment for
others.”—World
Development Report 2008, the World Bank
MIGRATION to the city, or even to other countries for
work, says the latest report from the World Bank, is no
way out for the rural poor. Not all the time, anyway,
and still the best way to solve rural poverty is
directly addressing rural folks’ problems right where
they are.
We
couldn’t agree more with the World Bank, especially in
the context of the Philippines where the government
seems to have abandoned the rural sector right after
legislators passed the Agricultural and Fisheries
Modernization Act (Afma) in 1998, supposedly to boost
the competitiveness of the farm sector following the
country’s joining the World Trade Organization.
The idea
that urbanization could solve everything stems from the
stylized view that countries with higher rates of
urbanization are usually richer and, therefore, with
lower poverty ratios, either rural or urban. This is
correct, especially as regards the experience of most
developed countries like Western Europe, the United
States and Japan, where industrialization came as a
flipside to urbanization.
In
theory, investors usually set up factories close to the
city, especially port cities, where they could hire
workers to operate the machines, bring in raw materials
either through the ports or rail systems, send the
finished products through the same transport networks,
and where overall costs are lower due to the
availability of other support or ancillary industries
and services like banks, insurance firms and accounting
services, among others. That process, in turn, attracts
workers from the countryside, extra hands that were made
redundant by the increasing mechanization of farming and
other technological innovations. The end result is a
competitive industry and services sectors growing fast
side-by-side an equally vibrant farm sector, a
wonderfully dynamic process that soaks up joblessness
and ultimately addresses poverty.
The
presumption here, certainly, is that government has
invested massively in infrastructure development, thus
facilitating an economic interaction between the farms
and industry, as well as the rural areas to the urban
areas. This is one variable that has always been lacking
in development strategies of most developing economies,
leading to what development economies call “premature
urbanization.”
Premature urbanization suggests that desperate rural
folks—lacking the means to make a decent living in the
farms due to lack of good infrastructure, health
services, land tenure, credit, and market information,
among other things—migrate in mass to the cities, hoping
against hope to get a better deal for them and their
families. In most cases, however, most of them end up in
the slums doing all sorts of odd jobs and putting
pressure on limited social services. There are simply
not enough factories to work in. And if there are, rural
folks are the last ones to get hired for lack of skills
and urbane social graces.
Despite
these drawbacks of premature urbanization, policymakers
continue to stick with urban-oriented growth strategies,
apparently for political reasons. Urban areas are where
the influential economic elite and noisy middle class
live, and it’s convenient for the state to forego public
investments in rural areas when funds are limited due to
failure to collect taxes from these elites. This was
clearly manifested at the height of the fiscal crisis in
the early 2000s, when the government practically stopped
investments in health, education and rural
infrastructure in the hope of achieving “fiscal
consolidation” and getting into the good graces of the
International Monetary Fund.
With
higher charges collected from the people through the
expanded value-added tax, the government now has
supposedly some resources for rural development. And
yet, we could hardly see any definite thrust toward this
end. Whatever initiative the government had was just a
pretext for a scam (the Joc-joc Bolante caper). It was
convenient to ignore the countryside because the economy
has been growing courtesy of outsourcing, electronics
and the recovery of construction, which are
urban-oriented. The idea now seems to be that
eventually, economic growth will outgrow problems like
joblessness and, later down the road, rural poverty.
This is
a misplaced assumption, essentially because the way we
are growing right now, economic growth might not be
sustainable. An urban-oriented growth is inherently
inequitable and is prone to accentuate not only the
urban-rural divide but also the gulf between the haves
and the have-nots. The latest study by Dr. Romulo Virola
and his team from the National Statistical Coordination
Board, saying the ranks of the middle class have been
shrinking, seems to prove this point.
It will
never be sustainable because such type of growth would
produce a revolution of rising expectations that may, in
its bizarre forms, manifest
rising criminality (a form of income redistribution),
and the continuing lack of political stability. The
continuing threats from terrorism being seeded in a
perennially undeveloped south, the persistent menace of
communist ambushes and “revolutionary taxation,” and the
disillusionment of the country’s professional classes
that are driving them to leave for foreign shores, are
just among the bad signs. |
