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Friday, March 29, 2024

Carrying capacity

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A news item about Baguio City’s woes during the long holiday period of the Asean summit provoked this article on the carrying capacity of many Philippine towns and cities, or for that matter, the country as a whole.

It was reported that thousands upon thousands of visitors to the so-called summer capital of the country were stranded in kilometers long traffic, when the city’s winding roads simply came to a standstill due to the sheer volume of visitors.

Baguio’s carrying capacity has been tested, and it is severely wanting.

But then again, on practically all months of the year, going to Baguio to enjoy its natural beauty has become less and less enjoyable.  I say this as a Baguio lover, having been an occasional visitor since my early childhood, and having seen how it has lost its charm through the years.

These days, whenever I go to the city of vanishing pines, I confine myself to a very few places and hardly move downtown.  I bought a small lot in Dominican Hill way back in the 80s and hoped to build a cabin where I could retire.  I have since rued the day I bought the lot.

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When my mom was helping in the business of a grand-uncle, we would go to the beautiful “air-conditioned” city once every month to collect from department stores my grand-uncle supplied dry goods to.  I still recall to these days how enthralled I was of the city’s ambiance and its famous chorizos.  To these days, I have maintained my loyalty to a purveyor of the same longanizas that supplies the Baguio Country Club.

When I got to high school, I would always take an annual hegira to St. Louis University for a Student Catholic Action leadership seminar from December 26 to 30.  We would be billeted at the Patria de Baguio upon the once lovely Session Road, now “killed” by that monstrous SM “City” that stole the beautiful Pines Hotel from Baguio lovers sometime during the Cory administration.

From college until the time my kids were in early childhood, we would go to Baguio from December 26 to 30, occasionally even spending New Year’s Eve there to avoid the firecracker pollution of the NCR lowlands.

 Until today, I “refuse” to work from the 24th  until New Year’s Day, and hie off somewhere to rest and relax.  But no longer in my once beloved Baguio.  I go there on occasional short visits when the capital is less populated by transients from the lowlands, but these past years, the city’s permanent residents have grown twenty times (perhaps more) than what the American colonials planned when they built Baguio City.

But Baguio is not alone.  Hindi siya nag-iisa.

Let’s skip NCR, with it’s daytime population hovering around 17 million, and a residential base of some eight million.  Sasakit lang ang ulo natin, at mabu-bwisit lang ang araw.

Another favorite city is Cebu.  Ever since the family moved to Butuan, Cebu was our halfway destination between Manila and Northern Mindanao, at the time quite “primitive” by urbanity standards. 

But look at Metro Cebu now, and weep.  To travel from the Marriott upon Ayala or Waterfront in Lahug to the airport in Mactan takes an hour minimum.  When an unpredictable traffic situation gets snarled, make that an hour and a half.  Just a tad better than the nightmare of NCR.

Or Boracay, whose water supply and wastewater treatment facilities I helped build when I was at the helm of the Philippine Tourism Authority in the abbreviated term of President Erap.  It has progressively deteriorated due to poor planning, poor local government management, unrestrained commercial greed, and is bursting at the seams, beyond its carrying capacity.  That’s another story for some future column.

Cagayan de Oro is another example for a city with so little land, compared to Davao and Zamboanga, but whose permanent residents have grown, and the transient population multiplied several times over.

Bacoor and Imus in Cavite as well.  I used to drive from Manila to Tagaytay City where I built a house in the late seventies using Quirino Avenue in Paranaque off Roxas Bouevard and could breeze past Aguinaldo Highway to my upland retreat in 40 minutes nighttime and an hour daytime.  That allowed me to escape the heat of NCR any time I fancied.  Now no longer, even with SLEX and Sta. Rosa.

Or my native San Pablo in Laguna’s southern boundary.  Or Lipa and Batangas City.  Malolos and Angeles, even Dagupan and Urdaneta up north.

Beyond poor planning of which our past leaders, probably with the singular exception of Elpidio Quirino whose birth anniversary last November 16 the nation hardly remembered, the real hex comes from unabated population growth.

Due to pressure from the numerous Church to which I profess religious loyalty still, we never managed our population growth.  Belatedly during the Marcos martial rule, we created a Population Commission to help curb a demographic growth rate averaging 3 percent per annum.

By the time Edsa “revolted” and ensconced President Cory, along with our homegrown Cardinal Richelieu, Jaime Sin into power, that population management program was thrown to the waste bin.  FVR, our first and only Protestant president tried to revive population management, and so did his short-lived successor, Erap, but Church pressure dribbled all significant efforts.  Then came GMA, whose legitimacy was always under threat, and who caviled to the pressure of church groups even to the extent of elevating to powerful cabinet rank advisers on “religious affairs”.

To his credit, PNoy pushed for the passage of the Reproductive Health Law, only to be stymied by protracted legal battle all the way to a Supreme Court which could not decide with finality, and issued a TRO while passing the buck to the Food and Drug Administration.

Only now, under President Duterte, and with FDA Administrator Charade Puno, did the regulatory agency declare that the birth control drugs that the mislabeled “pro-life” lobbyists called “abortifacients” were decidedly not so.

And so the national effort to manage population once more begins.

A bit late in the day, with a population expected to exceed 105 million by year-end, but still welcome news in the long over-strained carrying capacity of a small nation of 30 million hectares split into 7,101 islands.

But, let’s still celebrate the belated news, and hope the action of government and society will be determined this time.

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