MANY years ago, a national daily published a cartoon showing a caricature of a tall dark basketball player, obviously an American, who was holding a ball up high while staring down at a shorter player, suggestively a Filipino, and asking the question “How’s the air down there?”
Perhaps, it was the cartoonist’s way of telling the basketball-crazy Filipinos to stop dreaming of greatness in a game where height is might and where the shorter players are left smelling the armpits of the taller men.
It was clearly a denigration of the short people who would like to be Michael Jordan. The only consolation was that certain degree of concern in the question “How’s the air down there?”
Looking back, I now realize that the short man in the cartoon was better off than most Filipinos in the countryside today.
In the hype and hoopla over the ballyhooed economic progress and national growth which the political leadership says was attained by the country over the last few years, nobody has even bothered to ask those living in the remote areas of the Philippines “How’s life down there?”
How’s the economy in the village, town or provincial level?
It’s bad.
Poverty statistics show that in 7 of the country’s 16 administrative regions, 30 percent of the families still live below the poverty threshold of P16,000 in earnings every year with the national average placed at almost 20 percent.
Unemployment in the country is the highest among Asian countries at 7.3 percent.
These figures simply mean that at least 20 million Filipinos do not even earn at least P16,000 a year while there are 7.3 million more who could not find jobs.
There is a dearth of employment opportunities and jobs in the countryside thus the massive migration to the big cities resulting in big squatter colonies that are a boon to the vote-hungry politicians and a bane to the urban planners.
Filipinos who choose to leave their families behind to work abroad as construction workers, domestic helpers, nurses, doctors, engineers and seafarers now number almost 2.3 million.
The social cost of this modern day diaspora of the job-seeking Filipinos is very high, from broken families to children who are abandoned and uncared for and who turn to drugs.
The overseas workers, however, are the luckier ones. Many of them are able to send their children to school, build houses for their families and start a little business when they come home.
The unlucky ones are the barefoot Filipinos who slash the shrubs in the mountainside to grow a few hills of corn and plant camote to survive.
They do not even understand what “GDP” and “GNP” stand for and do not feel the so-called “economic growth.”
Hardly anybody in the Big City cares about the barefoot and disheveled short brown Filipino living in the countryside except perhaps a few like Ambassador Antonio L Cabangon-Chua.
When I asked him earlier last week if I could share the state of things among Filipinos living in the countryside through a column in this newspaper, he immediately said I should submit the first item right away.
So, starting this week, “The Barefoot Economist” will appear here as a way of sharing with the readers, most of whom are captains of industries and economic managers, and our national development planners the life story of the common Filipino in the countryside.
Hopefully, through this column, they will realize that in adding up the numbers to determine national growth, statistics showing the living condition of the rest of the 100 million Filipinos living outside of the big cities and in the remote areas of 7,107 islands of this archipelago must be included in the equation.
This column aims to tell the rest of the country how the air is down here.
ABOUT THE WRITER: Manny Piñol, a former journalist and 3-term Governor of North Cotabato from 1998-2007, holds a Master’s Degree in Rural Economic Development and has earned units for a doctorate degree in the same field. He has retired from politics after failing to regain the governorship in the last two elections. He now raises “Manok Pinoy,” a new breed of free-ranged backyard chicken which he personally developed, and grows rubber seedlings for sale in his nursery in Kidapawan City, North Cotabato. As Governor of North Cotabato, he turned the economy of the province around, lifting it from the group of the 10 poorest provinces in the country in 1998 with a poverty incidence of 52 percent to become one of the Top 30 Performing Provinces by reducing poverty incidence to only 29 percent when he left office in 2007. Today, the province slid back to the group of the poorest provinces in the country with a poverty incidence of 43 percent.