ALTHOUGH poverty alleviation has been costly for the government, Senator JV Ejercito on Friday noted it has only produced few significant results that changed the lives of poor Filipino families because the programs did not benefit the real poor and were used for political purposes.
“Somehow this has to end and we have to come up with a good exit mechanism,” said Ejercito who recently filed Senate Resolution No. 123 urging an investigation of the government’s dole program.
The senator also noted anomalies in a Commission on Audit report, citing that some Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program beneficiaries’ accounts remained idle and had unwithdrawn funds.
During the coming Senate budget hearing of the Department of Social Welfare and Development, Ejercito said he will raise other discrepancy issues in the agency like lack of proper monitoring of beneficiaries and unliquidated funds since 2010 amounting to billions of pesos.
“For me, no matter how I look at it, the 4Ps is still a dole-out mechanism. I am not totally sold out with the program, but I am glad that DSWD is finding ways to come up with an effective exit strategy since an abrupt decision to end it is tantamount to ‘political suicide’ for the present administration,” said the senator.
Villar also lauded the DSWD for relenting to her earlier plea to come up with a better version of the government’s conditional cash transfer program.
During the committee’s organizational meeting, Usec. Florita Villar of the DSWD Operation and Program Group, informed the senators that the agency already had an initial talk with the National Food Authority, Department of Agriculture (DA) and the National Anti-Poverty Commission, on a plan that will provide rice subsidy to CCT family-beneficiaries.
The monthly rice subsidy of 20 kilos of rice per household-beneficiary will be given on top of the cash grant.
Under the plan, corporate farming will be developed wherein local government units will be capacitated and assisted by the DA for them to organize their farmers. These farmerswill be the ones who will produce the requirement for the rice subsidy.
Villar first raised questions on the usefulness of the 4Ps during the Development Budget Coordinating Committee briefing on the P3.35 trillion proposed 2017 budget last month after figures showed that the program failed to bring down poverty incidence in the country.
From the present P62 billion, next year’s CCT program has a proposed budget of P78 billion.
“It is unfortunate that after spending billions of pesos and doing this for years, poverty level has not moved at 27 percent. It was 27 percent in 2010, it’s still 27 percent in 2016. That’s why I would like to exercise my oversight functions. I want to know if you have studied your model because I am thinking that there must be something wrong with the model that after six years of spending so much money, we did not make a dent on the poverty of the Philippines,” Villar said.