Wealth and poverty

The report is distressing to say the least because this is a social time bomb that unless the government takes a serious action instead of explaining it away as mere indicator and that the programs of the government will take time to impact on the lives of people, this situation can only deteriorate and may go out of control. Not that we wish this to happen but then history, if it be the better guide tells us that this is an ingredient of social upheaval.

The SWS survey of March, which the Business World first published reports that 55 percent of the respondents rated their family as poor. This is 45 percent higher than the result of the survey in December last year.

Projecting in concrete numbers, the survey thus say that 11.1 million Filipino families say they are poor in the March survey compared to the December survey of only 9.1 million families.

If there are four people per family (father, mother and two children) the number means that 44.4 million Filipinos think they are poor. The number can go up.

In December the number would just be 36.4 or an increase of 800,000 poor people in just a period of three months.

Let me not bore you with plenty of statistics but only on the implications and the message of these findings. The worst to claim poverty is in Mindanao followed by the Visayas while about Luzon posted in almost unchanged as in the last survey.

Everybody can quarrel with statistics, surveys and conclusions but the fact remains that these figures confirm what we see and feel around us – poverty in the midst of claimed wealth.

The government says that we are better than previously. That is its claim but the reality is that we experience more expenses than before and income generally had remained stagnant.

Pensioners, for instance of the GSIS and the SSS had their last pensions increased under President Joseph Estrada, none from Gloria Arroyo and nothing in sight under Aquino.

The rising cost of living is responsible for this rating. The survey, for instance say that median poverty threshold in Manila rose from P10,000 to P12,000; in the Visayas from P6,000 to P8,000 and in Mindanao from P6,000 to P7,000.

This rise in the threshold of poverty is basically the result of the increases in prices of basic commodities and services. What one can buy for P100 in December cannot be bought but for P120 or more today. Fuel prices had gone up, sometimes four times in a month while rates for water and electricity are climbing by the month.

For those who go to market, this reality is clear but those who sit in air conditioned offices with huge salaries a two or five peso increase in food prices is hardly felt.

The rise in poverty self-rating comes at a time when the government is claiming that the national economy is robust and that huge sums of money are getting into the country. Indeed the foreign currency remittances of our overseas workers are rising to over $11 billion monthly, the underpinning of our otherwise poor economic performance. The value of the peso is also rising.

The economic strength of the country rests on the fragile shoulders of the OFW and not of government performance which the surveys tell eloquently.

The money that the government claims as more that what we need is such that our government lent millions of dollars to the World Bank for loans to other countries, including Europe.

Truly this is a remarkable feat – a third world country lending to first world countries while its own people wallow in rising incidence of poverty.

Poverty in the midst of wealth is the reality but the government is engaged in image building in the world’s stage.

Wonder why the government fenced off the shanties of the poor in Metro Mania so the foreign visitors would not see them? The government cannot afford to show the ugly faces of poverty when it claims to have money to lend to other richer countries that had spent more than what they earned and now had to enforce an austerity program.

The continuing slide in the popularity of President Aquino is due to the perceived inability of the government to address the country’s slide to poverty. That cash had to be distributed to thousands of the poor is an admission that indeed so many had sunk so low in the economic ladder that the only way to prevent them from starving is to give them cash, an unproductive way of spending money.*

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