Dying at the margins
Dying at the margins
Updated 02:01am (Mla time) Dec 16, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 16, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE DEATHS and damage inflicted by floods cascading from the Sierra Madres underscore how relentless resource extraction -- heedless of the future -- created communities of over 26.7 million "core poor" people, who now live and die at the margins of the country's troubled economy.
Ateneo de Manila University's "Communities At The Margins" documents how policy, crafted by an "aristocracy of the moneybags," creamed rich fish stocks, extensive mineral deposits and lush timber stands. In the process, it beggared a people and a nation.
This 316-page book presents nine studies on how the poor cope within degraded areas. They include Sierra Madres' "post-logging" groups, Cebu's migrant-fishermen and South Cotabato farmers.
The book's editors are Germelino Bautista, former director of the Philippine Institute of Culture, and Hiromitsu Umehara of Rikkyo University. Umehara has written extensively on Philippine landlord-tenant relationships.
Filipino elites manipulated policy, over the decades, to wring from forests, mines and fishing grounds windfall profits. But these were splurged on luxuries, not shared equitably with workers. That guaranteed disaster.
Degraded reefs in the Panay Gulf and Bohol Sea yield only four to five metric tons of fish per square kilometer -- compared to their original potential of 15 metric tons, scientists J. H. Primavera and E.D. Gomez note. Once the Philippines' largest marine export item, the almost extinct giant clams were banned for export in 1996.
The Sierra Madres, the Ateneo study notes, was "one of the last forest frontiers." Massive logging began in the early '70s. By then, Mindanao's forests, which once contained the world's best dipterocarp stands, had been chain-sawed to kindling.
In the late 1950s, about 802,000 hectares of forestlands were leased out. By mid-1970s, 10.2 million hectares of forestlands in the Sierra Madres were being logged over.
A skewed tax regime spurred exploitation. Laws offered little incentive for conservation or reinvestment, the Ateneo study notes. Except for low permit fees for commercial fishing and for the export of exotic aquarium species, fish fingerlings were not taxed. Low taxes on mining declined through time.
Loggers got "liberal annual allowable cuts, zero export taxes, declining forest charges that amounted to only 2 to 6 percent of log prices and high protective tariff," it adds.
"State functionaries also provided incentives indirectly by inaction, through the non-enforcement of penalties against logging damages ... and illegal logging," a book understatement reads. That's street lingo for “kotong.” No Quezon province cop, for example, would accompany Environment Secretary Michael Defensor's probe into logging firms.
Instead of reinvesting, extractors splurged on luxuries, real estate, bank accounts abroad or "consumer durables" -- forerunners for overseas workers' families who rarely invest. Most spend for cell phones, TV, video and motorcycles etc., an Asian Development study shows.
Continued economic viability hinged on "sustainable extraction." New Zealand or Australia invests in tree plantations and are assured of continuing harvests. That did not come to pass here.
"State policy had particular consequences for people." Logging camps, fishing ports and mining towns drew migrant workers. They, in turn, pushed indigenous communities deeper into the interior.
Along the coasts, commercial fishers dislodged small fisherfolk. They "were not literally driven out of their residences, but pushed into greater levels of poverty."
This model enriched those with economic means and political power. But little of the wealth creamed off by fishing magnates, loggers or mining families "trickled down." As Harvard economist John Kenneth Gailbraith wrote, trickle down "is the less than elegant theory that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through the road for the sparrows."
Massive poverty instead persisted. One out of three families remain impoverished. The "core poor" includes workers, displaced from sunset industries like wood or sugar. They find themselves in households within calamity- or drought-prone areas. These vulnerable areas are without adequate water, sanitation or functioning irrigation systems.
Landless workers drift into towns or cities. Most remain jobless. Rural poverty is swapped for urban slum penury. "Population pressure and ecological degradation have already set the limits of internal migration," the book points out.
Voiceless and disorganized, they "burst from obscurity into TV screens only when their communities slip over the ecological cliff," the late Asian forester Sudhakar Rao wrote after mudfloods hit Southern Thailand and Ormoc.
The current debate focuses on who's to blame for Quezon's floods. That's irrelevant to a Philippines already mired in a "post-logging" era. Loggers are merely wiping out the last timber remnants. One of yesterday's wood prima donnas, our country is among today's timber paupers.
In that poor house, policy must give priority to "those who have existed in the shadows of growth," Bautista and Umehara write. Needed are a strong national government and a local-level leadership that transcend politics to reconstitute community life. Otherwise, people will continue to live and die "at the margins of the Philippine political economy."
Updated 02:01am (Mla time) Dec 16, 2004
By Juan Mercado
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 16, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE DEATHS and damage inflicted by floods cascading from the Sierra Madres underscore how relentless resource extraction -- heedless of the future -- created communities of over 26.7 million "core poor" people, who now live and die at the margins of the country's troubled economy.
Ateneo de Manila University's "Communities At The Margins" documents how policy, crafted by an "aristocracy of the moneybags," creamed rich fish stocks, extensive mineral deposits and lush timber stands. In the process, it beggared a people and a nation.
This 316-page book presents nine studies on how the poor cope within degraded areas. They include Sierra Madres' "post-logging" groups, Cebu's migrant-fishermen and South Cotabato farmers.
The book's editors are Germelino Bautista, former director of the Philippine Institute of Culture, and Hiromitsu Umehara of Rikkyo University. Umehara has written extensively on Philippine landlord-tenant relationships.
Filipino elites manipulated policy, over the decades, to wring from forests, mines and fishing grounds windfall profits. But these were splurged on luxuries, not shared equitably with workers. That guaranteed disaster.
Degraded reefs in the Panay Gulf and Bohol Sea yield only four to five metric tons of fish per square kilometer -- compared to their original potential of 15 metric tons, scientists J. H. Primavera and E.D. Gomez note. Once the Philippines' largest marine export item, the almost extinct giant clams were banned for export in 1996.
The Sierra Madres, the Ateneo study notes, was "one of the last forest frontiers." Massive logging began in the early '70s. By then, Mindanao's forests, which once contained the world's best dipterocarp stands, had been chain-sawed to kindling.
In the late 1950s, about 802,000 hectares of forestlands were leased out. By mid-1970s, 10.2 million hectares of forestlands in the Sierra Madres were being logged over.
A skewed tax regime spurred exploitation. Laws offered little incentive for conservation or reinvestment, the Ateneo study notes. Except for low permit fees for commercial fishing and for the export of exotic aquarium species, fish fingerlings were not taxed. Low taxes on mining declined through time.
Loggers got "liberal annual allowable cuts, zero export taxes, declining forest charges that amounted to only 2 to 6 percent of log prices and high protective tariff," it adds.
"State functionaries also provided incentives indirectly by inaction, through the non-enforcement of penalties against logging damages ... and illegal logging," a book understatement reads. That's street lingo for “kotong.” No Quezon province cop, for example, would accompany Environment Secretary Michael Defensor's probe into logging firms.
Instead of reinvesting, extractors splurged on luxuries, real estate, bank accounts abroad or "consumer durables" -- forerunners for overseas workers' families who rarely invest. Most spend for cell phones, TV, video and motorcycles etc., an Asian Development study shows.
Continued economic viability hinged on "sustainable extraction." New Zealand or Australia invests in tree plantations and are assured of continuing harvests. That did not come to pass here.
"State policy had particular consequences for people." Logging camps, fishing ports and mining towns drew migrant workers. They, in turn, pushed indigenous communities deeper into the interior.
Along the coasts, commercial fishers dislodged small fisherfolk. They "were not literally driven out of their residences, but pushed into greater levels of poverty."
This model enriched those with economic means and political power. But little of the wealth creamed off by fishing magnates, loggers or mining families "trickled down." As Harvard economist John Kenneth Gailbraith wrote, trickle down "is the less than elegant theory that if one feeds the horse enough oats, some will pass through the road for the sparrows."
Massive poverty instead persisted. One out of three families remain impoverished. The "core poor" includes workers, displaced from sunset industries like wood or sugar. They find themselves in households within calamity- or drought-prone areas. These vulnerable areas are without adequate water, sanitation or functioning irrigation systems.
Landless workers drift into towns or cities. Most remain jobless. Rural poverty is swapped for urban slum penury. "Population pressure and ecological degradation have already set the limits of internal migration," the book points out.
Voiceless and disorganized, they "burst from obscurity into TV screens only when their communities slip over the ecological cliff," the late Asian forester Sudhakar Rao wrote after mudfloods hit Southern Thailand and Ormoc.
The current debate focuses on who's to blame for Quezon's floods. That's irrelevant to a Philippines already mired in a "post-logging" era. Loggers are merely wiping out the last timber remnants. One of yesterday's wood prima donnas, our country is among today's timber paupers.
In that poor house, policy must give priority to "those who have existed in the shadows of growth," Bautista and Umehara write. Needed are a strong national government and a local-level leadership that transcend politics to reconstitute community life. Otherwise, people will continue to live and die "at the margins of the Philippine political economy."
posted by Dante at 2:01 AM
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