environment 8: population word war

THE POPULATION WORD WAR

Junie Kalaw

The raging word war between Catholic Church representatives and the indomitable secretary of health on the topic of condoms as a means of addressingour pressing population problem is turning NGOs red with frustration or green with envy, and the air gray from the swirling dust that has obscured the real issues surrounding our pressing population problem which are: the relationships between population and consumption, population and poverty, poverty and natural resource policies, and between population and human resource development.

A one-sided view of the problem considers population in terms of number of bodies and ignores the fact that these bodies consume food and use energy.  This view dominates even international fora like the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) where rich countries point to the fast rate of population growth of poor countries as the main problem of sustainable development, while poor countries single out the high per capita consumption of the rich countries as the major problem.

To bring the two sides together, a more realistic and dynamic population index would emerge by multiplying each unit of body by the per capita consumption of food and energy.  Thus, multiplying the Philippine 2.4% body count increase per year by a factor of one on both food and domestic energy-use yields a total of 2.5% on both counts.  On the other hand, the US yearly increase of 1.5% multiplied by 6 (the ratio of their per capita consumption of food compared to Filipinos) yields a total of 9%, and 1.5% multiplied by 13 (the ratio of US energy consumption to Philippine consumption) yields a total of 19%. There is a bigger problem, therefore, on the consumption side than on the birthrate side of the issue.

If we are to consider the warnings of environmental economists that our present US$32 trillion global economy cannot continue to grow sustainable in the closed biospheric system of our planet because we are now using 40% of net primary production of energy and that doubling this rate of appropriation by our species might not be possible, it becomes imperative for the rich to reduce their consumption and the poor their birthrates.

The correlation of higher birth rates with poverty is well documented.   There are two major causes: (1) the cultural bias for large families in the belief that more children is an investment for ensuring the survival of the family unit, and (2) the fact that women in poverty have less opportunities for education or options as regards childbearing.  Only when there is a rise in the income level of the poor does the family birthrate decrease.

Obviously, more than controlling poverty, both material and educational poverty need to be addressed to solve the population problem.  Perhaps if church representatives could fight to the death the causes of poverty, they would be performing a better witnessing for all the children of God.  If the church would threaten loggers, big landholders, and politicians with the same intensity they summon vis-a-vis condom-pushers, the country would be better served.

But levity aside, what is distressing is that all the heat the word-war has generated has not reached the core of the population issue, which is the quality of life as expressed in its consumption patterns and lifestyles.  The sustainability of our ecosystems, cultures, and communities ultimately depends on the citizens’ personal choices of what to consume and what lifestyle to develop. Perhaps for the first time in our evolutionary history, our private and personal decisions impinge so critically on public interest.  We need to translate our personal moral values into values for the common good.

If the concern of the church over the immorality of birth control could be expended instead on the quality and justness of the lifestyle of its faithful, then there would be integrity in its moral stance.  If the state could exercise the same determination over social equity and ecological security as on the prevention of birth, governance would be more sustainable.

Church and state have since seen fit to reconcile.  In the normal course of such moves, reconciliation amounts actually to a partition, with the church protecting its moral ascendancy and the state its political primacy.  But while it is necessary to respect cultural and religious differences, poverty is not sustainable and its eradication not negotiable.  As the North-South Commission Report on a Program for Survival puts it:

“While hunger rules, peace cannot prevail.  He who wants to ban war (or for that matter artificial contraception) must also ban poverty.  Morally, it makes no difference whether a human being is killed in war or condemned to starve to death because of the indifference of others.”

14 August 1994

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 6: beyond transparency

BEYOND TRANSPARENCY

Junie Kalaw

The launching of the Coalition for Transparency in Government provided President Corazon Aquino an opportunity to focus on a quality of governance whose absence from the national scene has been a major impediment to honest political and social reform. It was acknowledged that the lack of transparency has served to encourage and hide corruption and protect the vested interests of politicians and their business partners. It was also accepted that its presence should be an important mechanism for the participation of people in development. But what is not often pointed out is that transparency has an active dimension: it involves publicly disclosing and revealing what is in mere storage. Deliberate secrecy in government transactions is a crime against transparency.

It has been argued that the transparency of government was proven by the explosive headlines merited by such anomalies as the congressional fondness for overpriced coconut juice, sleek uzis, and smuggled cars. There is a sense, however, in which these thunderous dramas actually obscured the larger issue of the continuing legitimized plunder of our natural resources by a privileged few through multinational land tenure, forest logging concessions, and foreign mining and fishing operations. Real transparency has to begin with a disclosure of the involvement of public officials in the primary exploitation of natural resources, and this obviously is a responsibility of the state, which controls all access.

Within the context of development (the professed objective of all governments), the most relevant, and at the same time simplest, question to ask is: who will benefit from it? Land reform for whom? Selective logging for whom? In short, development for whom? In the interests of transparency, it must also be asked who should plan for development. And since the great majority of Filipinos today live below the poverty line, the issue is not just economic in nature but concerns the structural stability of Philippine society.

Upon examination of the mechanisms government has made available to the people to enable them to participate creatively in the democratic planning process, it seems that government did not sufficiently understand that it could actually be adding to the general muddiness. Public hearings, for example, were attended mostly by politicians and businessmen with personal vested interests. The Senate hearings on the log ban bill were attended mostly by loggers and government bureaucrats. There was no representation from the ethnic groups, upland dwellers, small fishermen, and farmers who are most affected by the continuing denudation of forests. The consultative conferences government held with academics included non-government organizations (NGOs). But these consultations were really just venues for the legitimization of the sponsor’s position with no provisions for feedback from divergent positions, let alone their resolution.

The Aquino government did not disdain to use the tripartite councils initiated during the dictatorship. But while these councils may have had the potential to be effective mechanisms for people’s participation, they suffered the tyranny of withheld information. To be truly effective, these councils need to share equally with private and non-government organizations all information about project assumptions and analyses.

The situation was compounded by the constraints imposed by the matter of foreign debt. In view of the profound effects of foreign debt transactions on the quality of the Filipino lives, it might be supposed that it was logical to be transparent. But sadly, logic did not prevail, and circumstances were not helped any by the refusal of multilateral debtor agencies themselves, like the Asian Development Bank and World Bank, to make public their program analyses and loan conditions. In this manner the people were deprived of opportunities to participate in decisions to incur loans or to assist in monitoring compliance.

Government needs to be reminded: development is not something the government can do for the people but something people will have to do for themselves. The people have to be empowered, however, through deliberate and active sharing of information about the government menu of plans, transactions, and programs. In the interdependence of our life processes, sharing invariably tends to benefit the whole, whereas hoarding breeds subtle tyrannies.

Philippine Daily Inquirer 4 July 1989

environment 5: ormoc & security

ORMOC: TOWARD ECOLOGICAL SECURITY

Junie Kalaw

The Philippine environmental crisis took what is possibly its heaviest and cruelest toll on human life in Ormoc City. According to eyewitness reports by survivors, the waters had come abruptly, almost in the wink if an eye, sweeping everything in its path, a veritable deluge which the camera conveyed as so many bloated bodies floating like so many discarded dolls.

In the comparably torrential rush to absolve itself, the government attributed the denudation of forests in the Ormoc area to logging activities harking as far back as the 1950s, declaring that there hadn’t been any logging in the area in recent years. Media caused more disturbance by reporting intimations from sources within the government itself that politicians, military officials, and Department of Natural Resources (DENR) officials were, in some as yet indeterminate sense, culpable. The partisan character of government’s response once more evaded the fact that ecological responsibility is shared beyond the time-frames of electoral politics; similarly, the readiness of certain quarters within government to blame their cohorts indicates a tendency to pass the buck. But this is the way that government mocks the people’s suffering. We would have been surprised if it got around to pointing out how the geothermal facility in Ormoc contributed to the disaster, for that would have come too close to its plans for Mount Apo in Mindanao.

Our concept of security needs reorienting. We erode fertile topsoil at the rate of one billion cubic meters a year, enough land to produce 10 million sacks of rice. There are 13 badly eroded provinces in the country today that qualify as unrealized security risks. If conditions in one or two areas decline enough to reprise Ormoc next monsoon, will the new administrationsimilarly wash its hands of responsibility?

Disaster relief operations in the country are usually undertaken by the military, who admittedly may be relied upon to fulfill this function. During such occasions, they are said to be diverted from their normal task of overseeing the country’s security. The frequent occurrence, however, of environmental disasters today compels us to ask if the current definition of “normal” military duties requires updating, having been drawn from an old and narrow perspective of national security. Isn’t it time that this old concept be amended to include ecological security, with the army tasked to protect our forests: the navy, our coral reefs and fishing grounds, and the air force our atmosphere?

For far too long, in all countries that have not had the fortune of having a long history of neutrality, the military has competed for resources that have promoted violence instead of peace, its concern being to maintain and modernize its armature, which amounts to a potential for violence. It will be argued, of course, that peace is precisely what is expected to bring about to the extent of adopting a functional rationality in the extreme case of war. However, it may in turn be argued that the concept of war has already changed substantially, as when the government itself speaks of the need to do war against ignorance or poverty, or when an industrial society exports toxic waste to secure its own people’s health, or strains another country’s standards of safety for its own profit.

The idea of ecological security entails the use of information as a weapon and shifts the focus from human targets to natural structures. Securing the integrity of natural structures then becomes a limit beyond which the military becomes obsolete because it will have transformed itself from being an instrument of genocide into a facilitator of the life process

10 November 1991