“Rice has already inched upwards, but wait until it spirals, the caveats being the severity of El Nino, and the strength of forthcoming typhoons”
Rather alarming is the March 26 to 29 survey of SWS where 51 percent of Filipino households rated themselves as poor.
But that is not the whole picture of poverty in these benighted isles.
“Compared to December 2022, self-rated poor rose in Metro Manila from 32 percent to 40 percent and in the Visayas from 58 percent to 65 percent. However, it fell in Balance Luzon from 49 percent to 43 percent, while it was statistically steady in Mindanao, moving from 59 percent to 62 percent,” SWS said.
“Poor families have been lowering their living standards, i.e., belt-tightening,” the report said.
6.5 percent are considered newly poor, as they did not consider themselves poor one to four years ago. Another 6.7 percent were non-poor five or more years ago, and 37.9 percent were “always poor.”
The SWS survey showed only 19 percent of Filipino households consider themselves “hindi mahirap.” The 51 percent rated themselves poor, while 30 percent were borderline.
What is an obvious conclusion one can make of these survey findings?
It is something our economic managers and our leader already know: inflation is eating up the incomes and little savings of our middle class, gouging out the little that our poor are earning on a hand-to-mouth existence.
It has created a new class of the “nouveau pauvre,” as the French would say, while making a very few, i.e., the economic oligarchs and the politicians, the “nouveau riche,” with a handful of the ancien riche whose forebears had so much to give succeeding generations by way of hefty inheritance now bringing out their savings to buy properties in Europe.
At about the same time though, the Philippine Statistics Authority trotted out findings which showed that unemployment has inched downwards to 4.7 percent in March compared to 4.8 percent in February and 5.8 percent in the same month last year.
Wow! Will wonders never cease.
Will the PSA and NEDA kindly inform the public about how they define unemployment?
If a person happens to have found work as a weekly-paid construction worker, and then finds no work after the project is finished, they were statistically employed at the time of the survey, and unemployed after.
This happens in our farms as well, when farmhands find back-breaking but menially-paid work harvesting palay, or cutting cane.
Meanwhile too, OCTA tells us that 71 percent of Filipinos nationwide believe the country is moving in the right direction, which is perhaps why they rate approval of our president and vice-president, trust included, in the excellent or very good categories.
Wow again!
Of course it is a given that in this Catholic country, hope springs eternal, and optimism abounds, even if the only salvation most young generations see in their life is to go abroad and get a better-paying job.
And farmers with small, uneconomical patches of land likewise dissuade their progeny from working in their farms, knowing that one, when they die, the small patch will be further subdivided among his children; and two, there is no future in farming under present conditions.
From all these gloomy findings released during the fiesta month of May, the Bureau of Treasury adds another.
Government debt has soared to 13.8 trillion pesos in March.
This should bring our indebtedness to more than the 60 percent of GDP threshold. But no need to worry, our economic managers will tell us.
Still, the huge debt limits the ability of government to fund more infrastructure, which creates jobs, or provide more social services, which means less money for health, education and social welfare.
It crimps our ability to borrow more, and if the BSP goes the way of the US Treasury and just prints more pesos, then the inflation will balloon.
It creates a vicious dynamic that makes the poor poorer, the middle class the nouveau poor.
As for food inflation, which apart from oil is bellwether for our price index, solutions are medium if not even long-term.
We have neglected agriculture far too long and inflicted far too many wounds upon the sector that curing them will be a herculean task.
To begin with, one year has proven that apart from giving the Department of Agriculture more funds from the GAA, the president’s being concurrent secretary has left the department operationally hamstrung.
As for quick fixes such as quick (and questionable) importations, look at the saga of sugar in the last year.
First, “bigay-bawi” import permits in August 2022, then “biglang-bigay” of 440,000 metric tons in the first quarter of 2023.
Yet, how much is sugar in the markets? In the groceries?
Still high at 90 to 110 pesos per kilo.
But as Sen. Risa Hontiveros avers, a few favored importers must have made billions so easily, courtesy of the DA.
And do not forget what I have been warning about in this space in so many previous articles—rice has already inched upwards, but wait until it spirals, the caveats being the severity of El Nino, and the strength of forthcoming typhoons.