Business Urged to Cut Soaring Poverty in Philippines Which Sees Nearly Half of People With Not Enough to Buy Food and Basic Necessities

by Ma Nguyen Tong

27-1-2002

As an offcial government survey revealed that more than a third of Filipinos live in abject poverty, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo appealed to the business community to do its share to help the poor. The 2000 Family Income and Expenditures Survey found 33.7 per cent of the population living in poverty, up from 31.8 per cent in the last survey in 1997, and that nearly half of the rural people could barely purchase enough to eat and clothe themselves properly. Close to four in 10 people in the Philippines are so poor they livie on less than 38 pesos (74 US cents) a day, government figures showed.

The board defines the poverty threshold as the annual per capita amount "required to satisfy food and non-food basic needs". It was 13,823 pesos (269.45 dollars) in 2000, up 22 percent over the 1997 threshold, it said.

"Thus, a family of six members should have a monthly income of 6,911 pesos to meet their food and non-food basic needs."

The Philippines entered a period of low growth after the 1997 Asian crisis, made worse by a political upheaval that later led to the ouster of president Joseph Estrada amid a corruption scandal in 2001. Economic output was estimated to have grown by 3.3 percent in 2001, compared to an annual birth rate of 2.36 percent over the previous five years.

The government said poverty incidence in urban areas rose by two percentage points to 19.9 percent, or one family in five in 2000. Rural areas were worse off, with 46.9 percent of all families considered poor -- a 2.5-point rise from the 1997 measure. Just 8.7 percent of families in Manila and suburbs were considered poor, though the figure is 2.3 points above the 1997 number. In the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, a self-rule area wracked by separatist rebellion and kidnappings, the number of families with per capita incomes that fell below the food threshold rose by 7.8 points to 35.5 percent in 2000, it said. Hundreds of US military advisers were deploying in that region to help Filipino troops try to crush the Abu Sayyaf

Mrs Arroyo said business leaders were in the best position to grasp the seriousness of the problems plaguing the country since they had "the collective advantage of education, knowledge, experience and mature economic perspective".

"It is you, more than any other sector, who should know that there are no quick fixes to our national problems," she told a forum of the Makati Business Club. "Roll up your sleeves and renew the partnerships for progress at the ground level."

The Government based the poverty level on the minimum amount needed to buy food and other basic needs for one month, that is, those deemed to live in poverty were unable to buy the basica amounts of food and other necessities to properly stay alive. Only 8.7 per cent of those living in metropolitan Manila were officially considered poor, while that figure rises as high as 46.9 per cent in largely rural areas outside the capital, the statistics office said.

The Government did not say why poverty had risen from 1997 to 2000. But the country's economic growth slowed significantly after the 1997 Asian currency crisis and amid political scandals under deposed president Joseph Estrada from 1998 to early 2001, and under the new leadership of President Arroyo, whose policies cater mainly to the interests of the country's rabidly wealthy economic and political elite who have essentially cornered the whole of the nation's wealth.

Mrs Arroyo said that "while her Government had succeeded in turning the country's economy around", the benefits had not yet trickled down to the poor. Indeed, they have not and given the penchant for greed and corruption in Philippines' society, quite unlikely to reach ordinary people. She also acknowledged that the Philippines was more divided now than a year ago, when a military-backed mass uprising ousted Estrada amid allegations of graft and incompetence. She also acknowledged that most businessmen were corrupt and dishonest and cared little for their fellow man, particularly leaders of the banking sector.

Mrs Arroyo asked the business community to help alleviate poverty by investing in rural electrification and mass-housing projects, helping to modernise and strengthen the country's public school system, and creating new jobs and in general being more patriotic and caring for their compatriots rather than only caring about themselves and their immediate families' wealth.