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Focus on the Philippines Number 42 |
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FOP 42 : Hunger and Poverty in Mindanao: 2 Perspectives (Part 1)
[1] HUNGER STALKS THE COUNTRY’S FOOD BASKET
by Billy de la Rosa
[2] AGRIBUSINESS CAN WIPE OUT RURAL POVERTY
by Ibarra Malonzo
In this Issue
The Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey on hunger and poverty and the government’s plan to distribute food coupons for the poor, drew a number of reactions from civil society organizations and triggered a public debate on the root causes of poverty and hunger in the Philippines and ways of addressing these issues.
The SWS survey pointed out a most glaring paradox—hunger in Mindanao, the foodbasket of the Philippines. Hunger incidence in the region was estimated at a national high of 23 % of the population. In this issue we present two perspectives on hunger and poverty from two prominent researchers from Mindanao. The first article is Billy dela Rosa’s Hunger stalks the country’s foodbasket. The article is highly critical of the export-oriented agribusiness strategy that has become the dominant paradigm for agricultural development in Mindanao. Dela Rosa laments that "the drive to make Mindanao the country’s food basket has contributed to chronic hunger that is made worse by economic shocks brought about by natural or man-made disasters." Dela Rosa is the Executive Director of the Alternate Forum for Research in Mindanao (AFRIM), a research and advocacy organization based in Davao City. The second article is Ibarra Malonzo’s Agribusiness Can Wipe out Rural Poverty. Malonzo counters Dela Rosa’s criticism of the agribusiness strategy. He contends that “On the contrary, it’s the absence of a well-rounded agribusiness strategy that addresses local, national and global markets, that is the bane of agriculture.” Malonzo asserts that "agribusiness strategy is the opposite of subsistence and marginal farming prevalent in Philippine agriculture and the principal cause of poverty and hunger in Mindanao." Malonzo is the Executive Director of Kasanyangan- Mindanao Foundation, Inc. (KFI), a Mindanao-based service NGO advocating agrarian reform and rural development, particularly by promoting local convergence initiatives for social enterprise development in agriculture.
The Dela Rosa-Malonzo debate reflects the sort of tensions and issues that complicate the question of agriculture, food and even trade policies in the Philippines.
The first article is reprinted from the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Oct. 10, 2004; the second piece came out in PDI Oct. 17, 2004.
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Focus on the Philippines Number 41 |
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The Republican Right’s Challenge to the Global Anti-War Movement
By Walden Bello*
There continues to be credible allegations of fraud, particularly in the vote count in the state of Ohio, but most of the United States, including the Democratic Party, has recognized that George W. Bush has been reelected to the presidency with a 3.5 million margin of victory over John Kerry.
Hegemonic Bloc?
The terrible truth, however, is that the Republican victory, while not lopsided, was solid. Another phase of the political revolution begun by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the 2004 elections confirmed that the center of gravity of US politics lies not on the center-right but on the extreme right. Now, it remains true that the country is divided almost evenly, and bitterly so. But it is the Republican Right that has managed to provide a compelling vision for its base and to fashion and implement a strategy to win power at all levels of the electoral arena, in civil society, and in the media. While liberals and progressives have floundered, the Radical Right has united under an utterly simple vision the different components of its base: the South and Southwest, the majority of white males, the upper and middle classes that have benefited from the neoliberal economic revolution, Corporate America, and Christian fundamentalists. This vision is essentially a subliminal one, and it is that of a country weakened from within by an alliance of pro-big government liberals, promiscuous gays and lesbians, and illegal immigrants, and besieged from without by hateful Third World hordes and effete Europeans jealous of America’s prosperity and power.
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Focus on the Philippines Number 40 |
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With Hunger on the Rise, It’s High Time We Revisited our Food, Agriculture and Trade Policies
By Jenina Joy Chavez, Mary Ann Manahan, and Joseph Purugganan
In this Issue
The looming fiscal crisis in the Philippines has been hugging the newspaper and broadcast news headlines for months now, spiced up by debates from academics and NGOs, and made juicy by discussions on slicing the pork barrel of Congress. Reacting swiftly to the crisis, the Philippine government has proposed a set of ‘quick fix’ solutions. New taxes, cost cutting measures, belt-tightening have all been served up as “bitter pills” to address the problem. What the government is not saying though and what media until recently has not been reporting on is a crisis that has been gripping the country for sometime—the crisis of poverty and hunger.
The Social Weather Stations (SWS) released last week the results of its survey for the third quarter of 2004. The survey, conducted over the period of August 5-22 2004 showed a “near-record-high 15.1% of household heads reporting that their families had experienced hunger, without having anything to eat, at least once in the last 3 months.” The survey also found “53% of respondents rating themselves as Mahirap or Poor.” The government quickly reacted to the SWS survey by announcing a plan to distribute food coupons for the poor.
The editorial of the Philippine Daily Inquirer last Saturday hit the nail right on the head when it said “Anyone with eyes to see would see that hunger has long afflicted this country. No one should be so blind to know that, for example, whole families daily depend on the refuse of others to survive. Parents and their wild-eyed children digging into filth and offal to find precious bits of sustenance, whether in broad daylght or in the dead of night, provide the macabre images; the Social Weather Stations survey merely provided the numbers.”
In this issue of FOP, we feature an article that analyzes these numbers against the policies on food, agriculture and trade that have been pursued by government. The authors are from Focus on the Global South – Philippines and members of the Stop the New Round!, a coalition campaigning against a new round of trade liberalization under the WTO.
An abridged version of this article came out in the Talk of the Town section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer last Sunday, October 10, 2004.
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Focus on the Philippines Number 39 |
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FOP 39 : The Micro Wars
[1] The Past as Prologue by Renato Redentor Constantino
[2] Monster at the Door by Mike Davis
In this issue
We have read about the so-called “small wars” or prolonged guerilla wars waged by the United States. In this issue we feature two articles that touch on wars of a much smaller nature, microscopic in fact. The first article is Red Constantino’s “Past as Prologue” a recounting of the horror of Imperial Japan's biological and germ warfare program benignly called Unit 731. The work of Unit 731’s main architect, Dr. Shiro Ishii and his links to the United States prompts Constantino to ask “Where else has the American government used Ishii's secrets? And who else has had access? Fifty years is a long time. Did not America invade Iraq to protect the world "from the potential horror of Saddam Hussein's supposed germ warfare capability?" Stuff happens, said Donald Rumsfeld. Will Ishii's weapons ever be used again? Where? By who?
The second article is the Monster at the Door by Mike Davis-an alarming article on the possibility of an avian-flu pandemic.
Whether it be through the use of biological weapons and germ warfare or the outbreak of killer viruses and diseases, the casualties of these “micro wars” can be staggering. “In May 1942, a cholera epidemic created by Unit 731 in Yunnan province kills over 200,000 people. Three months later, another 200,000 die in Shandong province as a result of Unit 731's germ warfare. In the Zhekiang province city of Quzhou alone, over 50,000 perish from bubonic plague and cholera” writes Constantino. Davis on the other hand cites “ In 1918-19 influenza pandemic: the single greatest mortality event in human history. In only 24 weeks, a deadly avian flu strain killed from 2 to 5 per cent of humanity (50 to 100 million people - including 675,000 Americans) from the Aleutians to Patagonia.
Yet, we are oftentimes caught defenseless against these attacks and are ill-equiped to confront these catastophic threats to peoples lives. Its about time we looked closer.
Red Constantino writes for the newspaper TODAY and its on-line partner abs-cbn.com, where this article is published. Mike Davis is the author of Dead Cities: And Other Tales as well as Ecology of Fear, and co-author of Under the Perfect Sun: The San Diego Tourists Never See, among other books. His article Monster at the Door was lifted from CommonDreams.org |
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Focus on the Philippines Number 38 |
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Contra Factum non esse disputandum: Reply to the UP School of Economics on the Fiscal Crisis
By Walden Bello, Lidy Nacpil, and Ana Maria Nemenzo*
The September 19, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer featured a response to the critique of Walden Bello, Lidy Nacpil, and Ana Maria Nemenzo on the UP School of Economics paper on the fiscal crisis (FOP 36). The response entitled “The Bello, et al critique: Biased and Economically unsound” was penned by six Phd student of the UP School of Economics (available at HYPERLINK "http://news.inq7.net/opinion/index.php?index=1&col=&story_id=11939"http://n
ews.inq7.net/opinion/index.php?index=1&col=&story_id=11939). In this issue of FOP we feature Bello, Nacpil, and Nemenzo’s reply to the paper of the UPSE students. This came out in the Talk of the Town section of the Philippine Daily Inquirer last 26 September 2004.
Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of Focus on the Global South. Lidy Nacpil is secretary general of the Freedom from Debt Coalition.Ana Maria Nemenzo is president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. |
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