Chiz Escudero

I welcome the scheduled distribution of food among grade school pupils but I warn the government against making the six-month program an opportunity for yet another scam.

I agree that the P1.5 billion allocated to alleviate hunger is not nearly enough, given the extent of the problem. It would be tragic indeed if a portion of the amount ended up in the pocket of corrupt government officials.

I’m sorry to sound like a spoiler, considering the nobility of the purpose, but the administration has the Midas touch in reverse. Gold turns into brass in its hand.

I suggest that the government give the religious order and non-government organizations a hand in the procurement and distribution to minimize corruption.

We have seen so many good programs in the recent past being co-opted by crooks. The fertilizer scam demonstrated that thieves would not spare even marginal farmers. I don’t think they would be finicky enough in their choice of victims to leave widows and fatherless children alone.

Health Secretary Francisco Duque and Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap the other day chided critics of the administration for raising doubts about the effectiveness of the Food-for-School Program and the integrity of those who are given the marching orders to implement it.

The government has only itself to blame for the widespread skepticism.

Every administration has its share of crooks. But evildoers in the present government are much more audacious. Unfortunately, the government allows them to go scot-free even after the scam is exposed. It thus practically encourages the others who are just waiting for their turn at the trough.

The announcement made by the two officials that they will broach no interference from politicians to make sure that the food goes directly to the children is laughable.

For obvious reason, the opposition is effectively excluded from participating. If the program fails, that means the thieves in the administration are at it again. But for the sake of the hungry grade school pupils, I want the program to succeed. Let the administration take all the credit, as long as the children get the full benefit. 

I am also warning you on the possible dissipation of the P27.5 billion fund intended for irrigation. The nation is in the midst of an election campaign. The temptation is just too great for some people to resist getting their hands at the money and divert it for election purposes.

The growing number of homeless in urban areas has become alarming. It is symptomatic of deteriorating economic condition.

A new type of urban dwellers has emerged and they are vastly different from the squatter families usually cited by sociologists when they talk about the urban poor.

These people belong to a subclass that fits the term poorest of the poor. They and their children are forced to sleep in parks and under the eaves of government buildings. For them, living in structures made of tin cans and discarded, second-hand lumber are a luxury.

Dr. Hideo Aoki of Urban Sociology Research Center of Japan, who conducted a study on the subject, calculated that Metro Manila alone has more than 100,000 street dwellers. He said these people earn a few pesos a day as scavengers, trinkets vendors, and car watchers, or simply as beggars.

Unfortunately, homelessness is not the lot of the uneducated alone. Even high school graduates who could find respectable work under a just and caring society are sometimes forced to the streets.

This phenomenon can be attributed to the government’s failure to create employment opportunities. I am saddened that even those who are fortunate enough to find work fare under the present dispensation.

It is bad enough that the government has been unable to put together a program that would create jobs for the people, it also fails to protect the rights of the laboring masses.

Let me cite the practice of contractualization in the retail and other sectors in the service industry. That termination of employment after three or six months contributes to make life uncertain for these workers.

The workers run the risk of being thrown out onto the street at the end of their contract. It is impossible for them to save because of their inadequate pay. Therefore they cannot pay the rent.

The government claimed to have built 382,295 in the period 2001 to 2004. Still, the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating Council admitted the number of slum dwellers would balloon, to 100 million in a decade.

The poor quality of high school graduates should be blamed on the failure of the government to create a condition conducive to education.

The Department of Education announced that, based on the result of the nationwide National Career Assessment Examination conducted on Jan. 17, only 468,901 of the 1.35 million high school graduating students this year have the aptitude to tackle college subjects.

The low NCAE scores are not due to innate deficiency of the students but to the inability of the government to give them the support they need to develop their full potentials.

The children attend classes under the most adverse condition. Now we’re reaping the fruit of government indifference.

Education Secretary Jesli Lapus had suggested that the low scoring 711,526 students can take up technical-vocational courses, which by the way shows that the government is right all along for emphasizing metalwork, pipefitting, carpentry, automotive mechanic as a career.

I fully support the government’s vocational education program, but it is wrong to assume that technical courses do not require much intelligence. Students taking up these courses need a working knowledge of English and mathematics, the very subjects which this year’s graduates have failed to master.

If DEPED persists with that mindset, it is creating a generation fit only to do manual, unskilled work.

The meager budget for education results in lack of classrooms, which is the reason why pupils in the elementary grades are crammed 60 in a room. Perhaps the most disturbing factor of all, is the exodus of teachers out of the country because of low pay. 

The low scores are also symptomatic of the worsening economic condition. In turn, government corruption causes the high poverty incidence. And as you may have guessed, corruption extends to the education department.

The rigged bidding process can only result in substandard teaching materials.

It is alarming that the Philippines might face the prospects of famine, with its dangerous dependence on other countries for its food supply.

I don’t want to sound unduly alarmist, but the crops could fail worldwide because of the erratic weather pattern. In that eventuality, the countries that now dump their excess production on the Philippines would keep food at home to feed their own population.

We tend to think that famine occurred only in biblical times, but we could suffer widespread hunger, thanks to an administration that puts agriculture at the bottom of its priority.

The country has fertile farmlands and free-flowing rivers for irrigation, but the government fails to exploit these rich natural resources to ensure food security. It dutifully appropriates funds for agriculture, but it diverts the money for other, useless projects.

Even government subsidy for fertilizers, taken largely from the sequestered Marcos wealth, was dissipated in a scam carefully laid to help administration candidates in the 2004 elections. If you trace the money trail, you would find that even cities had been allocated fertilizer subsidies.

Foreign governments encourage their farmers by subsidizing production of certain crops. In contrast, Filipino farmers are left to their own devices. Forced to buy fertilizers and other farm inputs at excessive prices, they are forced to produce crops at a much higher cost.

The people close to the powers-that-be cite the high prices of locally produced rice to justify the need to buy the cereal from abroad.

For instance, the Philippines imported 69,000 metric tons of rice from the United States late last year, at the height of the harvest season. We also import huge amount of rice from Thailand and Vietnam, thereby further discouraging our farmers from going into rice production.

The government obliges food importers by dismantling tariff against food coming from abroad. As if that were not enough, the government seems unable to stop smuggling of produce from abroad, which are sold at low prices in the domestic market.

In short, an impoverished country like ours is subsidizing farmers in the US and other rich countries.

Government policy on agriculture must be reviewed and revamped to help Filipino farmers and avert the disaster.

The employment figure trotted out by the administration is a cruel joke foisted on the Filipino people.

The National Statistics Office (NSO) claims that nine out of ten Filipinos are employed. Either the government agency is kidding or it is living in a fantasy world.

Maybe NSO had the figures confused. Could it be that nine of ten are unemployed?

There are infinitely more people who fail to land a job under the present government than under the administration it replaced in 2002, following a successful coup d’etat. 

The media reported a few days ago of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo being happy over the drastic drop in the unemployment rate. She said the employment rate rose to 92.2 percent in January this year from 91.9 percent in the same period last year.

But IBON, a private research group, has found out that unemployment is at a high of 21.5 percent, which means that 7.2 million Filipinos are still looking for a job. It said this is the result of a drop in employment in the manufacturing sector to 9.1 percent this year from 9.3 percent a year ago.

The discrepancy between NSO and IBON figures arises from the change in the definition of unemployment implemented by the government in April 2005.

Instead of creating regular, productive jobs, the administration resorts to accounting legerdemain to cut the unemployment rate. All of a sudden, lean-to builders in squatter colonies are designated masons or carpenters, seasonal agricultural workers in the countryside are deemed employed, along with trinkets vendors in cities and capital towns.

But even among the employed, grinding poverty is a fact of life. The P285 minimum daily wage, which most workers get, falls far short of the P766 a family of five needs to spend a day to maintain a decent standard of living.

The government loves to regale us with the appreciation of the peso and the rise in stock market trading, but these macroeconomic indicators are meaningless to the masses of the people, who neither speculate in the money market nor buy any shares of stock.

It is alarming that the military under the present administration could deteriorate into something like Haiti’s Ton Ton Macoute.

I was forced to draw the parallel after the administration refused to bring to justice the death squads who are responsible for the killing spree.  Not a single suspect has been identified, in spite of the fact that most of the murders occurred in areas controlled by the Armed Forces of the Philippines.

The body count is mounting and yet the government of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo regards the crimes as a mere public relations problem, better addressed by raising doubts about the motives of its critics.

After conducting a hearing, the US Senate concluded that members of the Philippine security forces had a hand in the murder of more than 800 leftist militants and journalists and the disappearance of an undetermined number of people. It thus confirmed the findings reached by the US State Department, the Melo Commission, and a UN investigation body.

Francois Duvalier, also known as Papa Doc, created the Ton Ton Macoute and granted them automatic amnesty for crimes they committed in an effort to prop up his unpopular regime. The dictator did so in 1959 after a coup attempt was mounted against him, unsuccessfully as it turned out, the previous year.

Philippine society has reached a degree of sophistication to allow a legal scheme so crude, but the administration, by denying the existence of the problem, attains the same goal. It makes it impossible to prosecute the perpetrators of the terrible crimes.

The AFP officers’ corps is hardly comparable to the Caribbean’s criminal gangs but added the few misguided elements within its ranks are being equally used by a morally bankrupt civilian leadership to repress dissenters.

All military organizations have their share of bad eggs, but they punish their members who stray from the rules of civilized conduct, something that cannot be said of this administration.

Despite the overwhelming evidence the present government chooses to deny the depredation of the political assassins, mostly of low-ranking soldiers. As a result the climate of impunity persists and the killings continue.

I am urging the government to regulate the placement fees and the remittance charges that overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) are being made to bear.

It is about time that the government  end the shameless exploitation of Filipinos who, for want of employment opportunities at home, are forced to leave their family behind for an uncertain future in a foreign land.

OFWs get a double whammy every time, dealt by recruiters and then by financial institutions.

Overseas Placement Association of the Philippines (OPAP) and the Philippine Association of Service Exporters Inc. (PASEI) announced they may have to charge Saudi-bound workers from $100 to $200 on top of the usual placement fees.

Everything seems to conspire against OFWs. Recruiters charge each worker leaving for a job overseas a hefty fee, up to P150,000. As a result, many of them don’t make any money at all for up to a year of their usual two-year work contract.

Once the worker is abroad, the banks take over and proceed to exact their pound of flesh. They exact a service fee of up to 20 percent of the amount a worker sent to his or her family back home.

A recent survey shows that money transfer firms charge an average of $16 transaction fee for every $100.

I don’t begrudge the recruitment firms and the banks their income, but the placement fees and remittance service charges are just too much for the OFWs and their families to bear.

As a result of the excessive transaction fees, some OFWs send money through friends and acquaintances and other means. But the practice risky, with the hard-earned money sometimes getting lost, to the distress of the family who live on the income of their loved ones abroad.

Still, the amount of remittances going through the formal sector increases every year.

As per record of Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the amount was $12.8 billion last year, a 19.4 increase from the previous year. The inflow in December was $1.3 billion, a 37.2 percent increase from the same period the previous year.

One can imagine how much profits the financial institutions make from the sweat and toil of our countrymen abroad.

I am not surprised at the conclusion drawn by a group that the Philippines is the most corrupt Asian country.

The Hong Kong-based Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) merely confirmed what the IMF-World Bank, Asian Development Bank, USAID, and other ratings organizations have found out. 

There is a correlation between corruption and poverty. The higher the corruption index rises, the lower the quality of life falls.

The high incidence of poverty is an indication of corruption. And the people instinctively realize it without being told, since it is they who feel the effects of corruption most, being its direct victims.

The prices of basic commodities have steeply gone up since President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo took over the reins of power.

A study prepared by the Department of Agriculture, the average price per kilo of ordinary rice went up from P21.94 in 2002 to P223.63 in 2006. The price of galunggong, on the other hand, rose from P72.53 to P93.84. Other agricultural products such as pork, beef, and vegetables have likewise made an upward price trajectory.

As a result of unbridled corruption, hunger stalks the land.

PERC gave the Philippines a grade of 9.4 out of a possible 10 in the corruption index. The group arrived at the rating after polling 1,476 expatriate business executives in 13 countries and territories of the region.

On the other side of the scale lies Singapore and Hong Kong, which are deemed the least corrupt. 

There must be something the administration has done or has failed to do to earn an almost perfect score.