“Despite al those multiple pages of print ads extolling the achievements of GMA’s government, her term — the first of a President with a PhD in Economics – will end with a negative economic growth.”
by Ducky Paredes
Romulo Neri, president of the Social Security System (SSS), has been saying the same thing since he was on the congressional staff of the Speaker of the House – what this country needs is seven percent economic growth rate over seven years. Thus, he says that the five percent annual growth rate we have been achieving during the nine years that Gloria Arroyo has been President has not been enough.
“Five percent is not good enough. We need about seven, possibly eight percent growth. That is why… this administration’s goal was to reach seven percent on a consistent basis.
“Unfortunately we have been caught up in some crises and we were not able to sustain it,” says Neri.
Thus, by 2006, five years into the Arroyo administration, about 30.1 percent of the population lived in poverty, up from 29 percent in 2003. Her best was 7.2-percent gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2007. Growth in 2009 was a mere 0.9 percent, the lowest in 11 years.
Neri, who served as socio-economic planning secretary from 2002 to 2007, notes that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer: “Much of this growth is going to corporations. If you look at the savings rates, in the 1970s, much of the savings was in households, now the savings has shifted to corporate savings.”
Officially, the Philippine economy is not in recession since we still have growth no matter that it is miniscule – too little to be felt by anyone except those who plot such numbers — zero point something. Clearly, this is meaning less to our population of the mostly poor.
Despite al those multiple pages of print ads extolling the achievements of GMA’s government, her term — the first of a President with a PhD in Economics – will end with a negative economic growth, if we exclude the billions that will be spent by candidates for the elections. In the end, it was her politics that brought down her economic scorecard.
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According to the Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey in January, involuntary hunger has reached record numbers, with almost one in four Filipino households going hungry in the past three months. Not only that, SWS also found indications that poor families have been lowering their standard of living.
Compared to the results of a similar survey in October, overall hunger rose 11 points in Metro Manila (27 percent or about 665,000 families); eight points in the Visayas (27.9 percent, or about 1 million families); six points in Mindanao (24.5 percent, or about 1 million families); and two points in the rest of Luzon (21.2 percent, or about 1.7 million families).
Senator Edgardo Angara, a former Agriculture Secretary notes that this only shows the urgency to prioritize hunger mitigation programs that target the country’s absolute poor, those who have no means to buy food.
Hunger, no matter how one looks at it, is a function of wealth distribution. The wealthy have a surfeit of food and the destitute go hungry. Says Angara: “There is a need to establish mechanisms and promote national policies that give incentives for maximizing agricultural production. This could solve the problem in two ways: Increasing food production to stabilize prices and prevent fluctuations in supply, and raising the incomes of the rural poor who are often the casualties of hunger.”
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The new policy adopted by the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) disallowing the “no permit, no exam” rule in all schools should not be anything that that schools object to. The schools say that they cannot pay their teachers with the promissory notes that the parent must accomplish before their children can take the exam. They do not have to since they can withhold the results of the exam taken by the student. So, how does this compromise the schools?
The only difference is that the student took the exam. Certainly, that will not serve any purpose if he cannot know the result and use it to promote himself, The school still holds all the aces since if the student quits the school, his scholastic record will show only that he finished only up to the last paid semester. So, how does that work against the school?
Of course, they cannot pay their teachers with promissory notes but do they pay their teachers according to how many take the exams? Thus, this sort of argument means nothing just as the exam taken by a student without the result ever being known means nothing, too.
The only thing that the school loses is the use of an exam paper. That is not much.
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Ever since I met Danding Cojuangco, I have considered him a friend – an unlikely one at the time, since he was among Marcos’ favorites and I was actively campaigning against the dictator (after all, my mother was in military detention). But Danding accepted me as a friend, after I interviewed him for an article. I was invited to his house and even to Bacolod and Davao in his plane that he piloted himself for the trip.
Danding loves this country and only wanted to do for the Philippines what he could. He was good for San Miguel, no doubt about that. Given the chance, he would have been as good for this country, too.
Thus, I hope that the news about him – that he is fine but that, after a heart procedure, the medication that he is taking has a disagreement with his stomach is all that is bothering him – is all that it is, as his wife Gretchen, says. “He is fine. Why don’t you all come visit him?” And adds: “They say it’s stage Four cancer? Thank God it is not.”
Yes, thank God.
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hvp 02.01.10
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