Category: politics

the audacity of chiz

nagulat ako kay chiz.   nagulat ako nang sabihin niyang he’s out of the nationalist people’s coalition, that is, out of the shadow of party bosses playing traditional politics.    napa-wow ako sa kanyang declaration of independence, at sa wari ko ba, as i watched him declare himself a free man, free to serve the filipino people as they deserve and not as a political party dictates, i swear his aura changed, gumaan at umangat, at nagkaroon ng ibang kislap ang kanyang mga mata, no kidding!   it must be, like, you know, liberating?

before this, since ondoy, i’ve been saying to anyone who asked kung kanino ba ako na i will campaign and vote for the candidate who will promise to clean up not just the government but also the environment, and one who has the character and the personality to impose and implement a zero waste policy nationwide, which would mean radical changes all around that should shake up the system.   to my disappointment, i’ve heard nothing like this from manny, gibo, noynoy, erap, or chiz.   BUT to the credit of chiz, he was is the only presidentiable who has  concrete proposals re the relocation and rehabilitation of flood victims to alleviate  suffering.   This one in particular was an unexpected surprise:

Sen. Francis Escudero asked landlords to help in rehabilitation efforts by donating land to be developed into relocation sites.

“If they have a hundred hectares, perhaps it will not be too much to ask for them to donate 10 hectares,” he added.

i wondered of course what danding would have had to say to that.    it might even explain the rumored limited funding by npc.   but whatever triggered offchiz’s decision to bolt the party, it doesn’t matter as much as the fact that he bolted.

While Escudero’s resignation surprised many, a lawmaker from the militant Bayan Muna party-list group welcomed the move.

It is “a major political development in the presidential race. His move to bolt the NPC is a welcome move that should develop his capacity to take on many people’s issues in performing his duties to the people,” Rep. Satur Ocampo said.

Ocampo dared other aspirants to also take the stand of Escudero.

Rep. Mong Palatino of Kabataan party-list group said that the senator’s move could usher in “platform-based politics” in the 2010 polls.

this is even bigger and braver than mar roxas sliding down to vp.   suddenly noynoy isn’t such a sure thing.   audacious chiz is looking smelling talking good.   the game continues to change.   noynoy has some catching up to do.

environment 7: denr & the poor

THE DENR & SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
(Why The Poor Will Always Be With Us)

Junie Kalaw

In Mindanao, two years after her historic succession to the presidency, President Aquino, a very religious person, appealed for the help of the citizenry, especially institutions like the church and other non-government organizations (NGOs), in reaching “the poorest 30% of the population,” and offered the work of some monks as a model of what can be done.  Appropriately enough, the monks of the Monastery of the Transfiguration in Bukidnon, where the President made the appeal, are involved in reforestation and adapting farming methods to sloping lands, and literally lived with the bottom 30%.  These Filipinos occupy government-owned “forest land,” do not have access to government agricultural extension-work benefits or credit, and survive off the beaten track taken by the health-services delivery system.  They are under the sufferance of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) which, in its capacity as representative of the state, controls 50% of the country’s land area, all its forests including the flora and fauna therein, and all other natural resources.

In callingfor assistance to the country’s poorest 30%, the President could not have done worse than to refer the matter to the DENR which has always treated these 14 million Filipinos as problems, absurd as that may sound, and not as constituents whose poverty may have developed in them the prayerful habits commonly associated only with the likes of President Aquino and monks.

… The rural development strategy of Philippine policy-makers confirms government’s alienation from the people. The Department of Agriculture, for example, bewails the following:

Trade, tariff, and tax policies which strip agriculture of its attractiveness to private investors;

Monopolies and excessive government regulation of agricultural markets which steal from the farmer his fair share of returns from his produce and foster inefficiencies in the marketing system;

An exchange rate policy that overvalues the peso and thus makes exports less competitive than they would otherwise be in the world market;

The insufficient and declining share of government expenditures going to rural infrastructure and support services needed to pump-prime the rural economy;

These policies combining to create a biased incentive structure which favor the urban and industrial sectors and penalize agriculture and the rural sector.

It might help in planning as if the poor really mattered to flesh out impersonal technical terms like “rural sector” and call them what they in reality are: farmers, subsistence fishermen, kaingineros, and landless laborers.  It is they who are penalized, not a “sector.”  It is defective policies, not their poverty, that drive them to insurgency. Bureaucratese has its own way of annulling the government’s best intentions by reducing questions of ideology to technical cover-ups.

Consider the policy prescription of “fashioning a policy environment conducive to private investments in income-enhancing and employment-generating agro-based rural enterprises.”  Thus worded, it effectively masks the fact that the biggest investors in our rural areas are our farmers, upland dwellers, small fishermen, and landless laborers who toil and sweat it out.  They should be given control and tenure over the resources they work with.  They are the ones entitled to support and incentives to make their investments profitable.  A value-added increase the equivalent of Php1,000 per person of our rural population is about the same as a US$10 billion investment in the rural areas and amounts to a scenario far more honorable than foreign investments or even grants.

It was correct of the President to call on the church and NGOs to extend a helping hand, even though in the course of heeding this call many of them will have to develop alternatives to existing policies of government departments and to contend with being stigmatized as “subversive.”  But perhaps the President should have first looked around her to see why, given the policies of the men she trusts, the poor may always be with us.

Philippine Daily Inquirer, 5 September 1990

environment 4: forests left

FORESTS LEFT

Junie Kalaw

Traditional politics dies hard.  Upon Mrs. Aquino’s exit, with the convening by President Fidel V. Ramos of a new legislature and the appointment of a new secretary for the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR), the battle continues between those who wish to continue the existing system of commercial logging by a few Timber Licensing Agreement (TLA) holders in our natural forests and those who are demanding a change in the management and protection of our remaining forest resources through a moratorium on commercial logging.

At present 127 concessionaires have rights to about 5 million hectares of our forest.  Sadly, at least 45 of these concessionaires have violated the reforestation provisions of their leases.  Satellite date show that their concessions have open areas of more than 40%.

The logging industry, while it has made a few families extremely wealthy, has been a poverty-creating and environmentally destructive industry.  Foreign financial assistance conditioned on liberalizing trade and investment in our logging industry (e.g., the US$120 million Natural Resource Management Program of the U.S. Agency for International Development with the DENR) perpetuates this social inequality since only the wealthy and well-connected can be market players in the industry.  Claims to employment-generation and dollar earnings from the logging industry only serve to hide the fact that the percentage value added by labor in the industry is minimal and that whatever foreign exchange is obtained from exporting prime natural resources just goes to importations for the wants of the wealthy few in urban areas and not for the needs of the poor communities in rural areas.  Any government serious about poverty eradication cannot allow this to continue and at the same time be credible.

The 1992 World Bank Development Report cites a previous study by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) that discloses that only 1% of commercial logging of natural forests has been found sustainable.   It is doubtful that the Philippines has a higher percentage.  The old forestry profession and academic discipline was a product of the needs of the logging industry, thus you have a number of foresters employed by the loggers claiming sustainable logging of natural forest with no substantive proof to show.

It needs repeating that a continuation of present policies is bad economics, bad social policy, and bad governance.  While the logging industry has been very profitable for TLA holders (according to the Asian Development Bank, the logging industry’s profits from 1972 to 1988 added up to US$42 billion), a recently concluded research study by the World Resources Institute estimates the depreciation of our natural capital in terms of forest, soil, and fisheries from 1970 to 1988 to have been 4% of our gross domestic product (GDP).  The depreciation is even bigger than the increase in the country’s foreign debt for that period, which is about 3.5% of GDP. This is the unaccounted cost that economists call “externalities” and is paid for not by the loggers but by the small farmers in terms of loss of topsoil and water for irrigation; by the small fisherfolk in terms of loss of catch due to siltation of coral reefs; and by indigenous people in terms of dislocation from their ancestral domain.

There are other unaccounted costs.  For instance, there are financial obligations arising from borrowed funds, like our Asian Development Bank loan of US$240 million for a much publicized reforestation program, which was in effect a subsidy for TLA holders since the effective cost of reforestation was much more than the rent captured by the government from TLA holders.  We also have to take into account the irreplaceable loss of life information encoded in various forms of plant, animal, and marine life in our forests and coral reefs.  This information is one of the most valuable resources of our country, which although lacking in financial resources and technological advantage, is nevertheless one of the richest repositories of information which research translates into food and medicine for our future.

As the ecologist Herman Daly points out, natural capital is not substitutable with man-made or human capital.  The needs of the poor have an irreducible physical form and quantity; no matter how many boats and fishing hands we put out to sea, if the fish stock is gone, then Filipinos will have no fish to eat.

Studies of the rainforests in Brazil show that extractive activities in the forest, such as harvesting of vines, resins, nuts, and medicinal plants, yield three times more economic value than the cutting of trees for lumber.  Studies in Bacquite Bay in Palawan show better income (in terms of alternative benefits) and longer-term employment for people from retaining the forest, including fishing and tourism, than from logging the area.

As a positive measure, small community-managed social forestry can be geared to respond to the housing needs of local communities.  The DENR Forestry Master Plan shows that commercial tree plantation can answer the major commercial needs for wood by 1995.  As a bottom line, importing necessary wood requirements from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) open market, with Malaysia and Indonesia as abundant suppliers, is a better option than cutting our remaining forest because logs are grossly undervalued as a resource in the international market.  It is a better use of foreign exchange than importing luxury items.

A politically convenient argument used by the past DENR administration to reject the total log ban bill cites the fact that big loggers can employ one armed guard for every 500 hectares of forest concession while the DENR has only one unarmed forest guard for every 4,000 hectares.  The proposition begs two fundamental questions: “For whom?” and “Against whom?” are the big loggers protecting the forest.  The answers are obvious: for their own profit, and mostly against the poor who squeeze out a living doing slash-and-burn subsistence agriculture, and the small illegal loggers from poor communities around the areas.

This is a diversionary argument often raised by the public relations writers of the wood industry lobby.  Their reasoning is onerous in the sense that it picks only on the last segment of a chain of events that causes the destruction of our forests and in effect puts the blame on the victims of resource-deprivation caused by bad social policies, such as our current forest policies.  The need to provide for the poor’s basic fuel needs is one of the main arguments for stopping the destruction of forests so that forests can be managed to yield fuel wood without killing the trees.

The proposition also goes against our historical experience, which shows that the successful and sustainable use of natural resources is realized when regulations for access and benefits are determined and enforced communally.  This is different from reverting control back to government wherein natural resources are viewed as “free” public goods or part of the political bounty from which it is all right to steal.

The continued legalization of the plunder of our forest resources by a few powerful TLA holders completely contradicts the present government’s announced policy of people participation in the control and management of their resources for their own ecological protection and development.  The continuation of such destructive policies goes against the primary responsibility of government to provide basic “natural” security, by which is meant access to clean water, fresh air, fertile soil, and safe habitat for its citizens.

Ever since our Western-modeled Constitution conferred on the state the exclusive rights to our natural resources, and ever since our politicians built a culture of appropriating these resources as a means for developing political patronage, our ability to use our natural resources to address poverty and ensure a socially just and equitable development for the people has been highjacked.   The pressure on the president to appoint a former logger and a political creditor as head of the DENR, through the gritted teeth of politicians mouthing political campaign slogans against patronage politics and for environmental protection, attests to this.

Manila Chronicle, 7 August 1992

environment & revolution

if junie kalaw were alive he’d be saying i-told-you-so, just like odette alcantara.   junie and odette were our leading environmentalists, pioneers, who didn’t live to see the great floods wrought by ondoy & pepeng [and some dam(ned) officials] but who warned us often enough since the 1980s that this would happen one day unless we changed, radically transformed, our politics and lifestyles.

i never got to meet odette but junie i knew very well.   youngest son of maximo m. kalaw, the author, educator, and fierce advocate of philippine independence from the united states in the early 1900s.   met junie in ’84 through jorge arago and it was as researcher and managing editor of his journal Alternative Futures that i learned all about the sad state of our environment, thanks to bad government policies.

in ’97 anvil came out with junie’s book Exploring Soul & Society, a compilation of papers on sustainable development published and presented in different publications and fora here and abroad from1986 to 1995.   the first part, Environment & Revolution, opens with a call to empower ourselves a la EDSA.

finally the time has come.   john nery is correct,  the political dynamic has changed, the environment is an agenda waiting for a president.

A LETTER TO FUTURE FILIPINOS

by Maximo ‘Junie’ Kalaw

Our story began more than 14 billion years ago with a burst of cosmic fire and the evolution of our solar system. Ten billion years later, life forms were spawned on our planet, followed by the emergence of human consciousness, which formed and informed different cultures.

Early myths speak of a Being who created us, our land, forests, rivers, mountains, oceans, and all living creatures. This Being — known as Apo to the Lumads of Mindanao, Kabunian to the Kalingas of the Cordilleras, and Bathala to the Negritos of Central Luzon — imbued all creation with a sacred potential.

Beginning in the 16th century, however, waves of colonialism washed over our island archipelago. The Spaniards, then the Americans, then the Japanese brought with a different source of power and revelation about the nature of life. The Divine was driven up to the heavens and life hereafter. Nature was viewed as a mere resource for making mechanistic and utopian dreams come true, legimitizing conquest, exploitation, and two world wars.

Five centuries later we find ourselves at a critical moment in our history. Our survival as a people is imperiled by the destruction of our tropical rain forest, the erosion of our topsoil, and the killing of our coral reefs. We are shutting down, ierreversibly and at an alarming rate, the very systerms that support life.

Yet our population continues to increase, even as more than half of us live on incomes inadequate to feed an average-sice family. Because every one of us owes foreign creditors over Php 3,000, we sell what remains of our precious natural resources at undervalued prices and allocate more than 43 % of our foreign exchange to servicing foreign loans. If present conditions continue, the sustainability of our society is doubtful.

We cling, however, to the belief that grave crisis is a correspondingly great opportunity for change. This crisis is pushing us to take a different view of ourselves, our Inang Bayan, our planetary home, and the process we call development.

It is an opportunity to recover our cultural identity and affirm the values of our indigenous peoples; to create with them an alternate way of caring for the life that flows through all beings; to translate this vision into new forms of villages, farms and factories, transportation and communication; and to live a sustainable spirituality which translates the teachings of great spiritual traditions into norms and ethics that can guide the realities of large wholes and systems.

It is an opportunity to empower ourselves anew, as we did at the EDSA revolution, by participating in decisions that affect our future. We need to create a completely different chapter in our story as a people and as a species where the predominant ethics of our actions will be based on the authority of Nature and our interconnectedness with her, thus empowering us to transform state, party, and church bureaucracy.

It means the exercise of a different kind of politicalwill, that is, a new politics of facilitating the flow of life/resources rather than accumulating it as political bounty. It means the exercise of true service in the noble enterprise of creating a Filipino community within the sacred community of life on earth.

On our ability to transform ourselves rests your future.

Time Magazine, December 1990