Democratic solutions to fight poverty (First of two parts)

Empowering the Filipino People

By FORMER PHILIPPINE PRESIDENT FIDEL V. RAMOS

March 5, 2011, 11:31pm

 MANILA, Philippines – The recent domino-like outcomes of people’s uprisings in many closed societies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), caused the collapse of the 23 year-old dictatorship of Tunisia’s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the 30-year regime of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. These replicas of our 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution and the 1989 downfall of the Berlin Wall were basically caused by people’s hardships and deprivation of freedom and fundamental human rights.

Today, the world is seeing the impending collapse of Libya’s despot, Muamer Khadafy, who has ruled with an iron fist for 42 years. Similar riotous protests for the same reasons of government repression, official kleptocracy, and impoverished people are taking place in MENA, notably Yemen and Bahrain.

Filipinos viewing these traumatic developments on TV are re-living the 1986 EDSA People Power experience, which was non-violent and generally peaceful.

Oppression, repression, violence

These earth-shaking events were sparked by the suicide by self-immolation of a poor, desperate Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, when his humble vegetable cart was overtuned by police last 17 December 2010.

This week, in an unprecendented decision, the UN Security Council voted 15-0 to impose sweeping sanctions against the regime of Muamer Khadafy for his violent responses to street protests, led mainly by courageous family heads and internet-savvy young people. The UN’s sanctions include an arms embargo, global freezes on Khadafy’s assets, and travel holds on 26 relatives and key officials.

For the first time, the US directly called for Khadafy’s resignation and declared its options “open” for political as well as humanitarian actions to end Libya’s suffering.

Outraged world leaders have called for the direct intervention of the International Criminal Court to bring Khadafy to trial – reminiscent of the same way Serbia’s late President Slobodan Milošević was tried by the UN International

Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (2001) and Liberia’s former President Charles Taylor was extradited to the Hague to face trial before the ICC for “crimes against humanity” (2009).

Authoritarianism does not endure

In East Asia, development over this last generation was organized largely by authoritarian governments seeking both to perpetuate themselves and strengthen their regimes against outside intervention.

Nowadays – with the economy in distress – many Filipinos, in their despair, long for a leader strong enough to knock heads together, in order to point the country in the right direction.

To our mind, however, authoritarianism – no matter how benign – will not work in a diverse society like that of the Philippines. The Marcos regime, which was overthrown by the combination of valiant, God-fearing people and a rebellious but professional military component in February, 1986, clearly proved that dictatorship does not endure.

As we have already experienced, the Philippines is democratic enough for people to demand their political rights, yet still feudal for many in positions of authority to regard government as just a means of distributing patronage to preserve their spheres of influence.

Power is slippery and hard to grasp in a multi-cultural society like ours, because most ordinary Filipinos would stand up for their rights and equal place under the sun.

For a national society like ours, authoritarianism becomes a cure worse than the disease.

Democracy is human development

The solutions to our ills we must seek democratically; through government institutions and NGOs that enable ordinary people to obtain their needs for themselves and their communities.

What is it that poor people really need? They need good health in order to enjoy a productive life long enough to raise a quality family of which one could be proud. They need wholesome communities to live in – decent homes, safe workplaces, and crime-free streets.

They need steady sources of income and good education for their children, and jobs for the youngters when grown up.

Poor people need the freedom of choice that predictable incomes enable them to have. Hard work and long hours are not a hindrance to their determination to make good, as long as they aren’t abused by local tyrants.

In any listing of poor people’s priorities, education ranks among the highest – because education is the ultimate ladder of opportunity for aspiring individuals.

Education is more than just an economic advantage in the struggle to earn an honorable and adequate living. More importantly, education enables poor people to look critically at the social situation to which education awakens them – and provokes them to act to transform the society that has excluded their participation.

In East Asia, this great awakening has been responsible for the transformation of even authoritarian states into working democracies.

Building state capacity

Cynics have said that democracy is a luxury poor countries cannot afford.

Now we know that, to the contrary, democracy can sometimes spell the difference between life and death for poor people.

Dr. Amartya Sen’s study of the famines in India, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia led him to believe that mass-starvation can occur – even when there is enough food – if despotic governments remain indifferent to people’s distress.

Hence Dr. Sen, a Nobel laureate (1998), concluded that in these famines, “it was the lack of democracy, not the lack of food, that left millions dead.”

Of course, the lack or absence of democracy can arise, not necessarily from authoritarianism, but simply from state weakness.

In the past decade, “pa-pogi” (or hand-out) programs have been the norm. Popularity contests among leaders have enabled celebrities, oligarchs, and cronies to use their privileged access to government’s machinery to extract “unearned income” from the economy.

The weakness of the Philippine state prevents it from carrying out “hard” reforms and broadening our electoral democracy.

Hence, among our most urgent needs is to build up state capacity – by creating democratic systems, socio-economic institutions, and physical infrastructures that are enduring and autonomous enough to pursue our national modernization.

These structures necessarily include the civil service bureaucracy and political parties – to which both we must infuse with a stronger sense of patriotism.

Winning the anti-poverty battle: Reform!

For transitional democracies like ours, political reform is painful, protracted, and complex – it constitutes change that we can no longer put off.

The poor enforcement of laws and bureaucratic red tape are powerful disincentives to investors that our country’s strategic location and high-quality workers are hard-put to offset.

Corruption is the other massive drag on progress. Its cost we must count not only in money – although God knows that alone is exorbitant enough.

How to check it? One obvious way is to limit state interventionism – by deregulating the economy; by opening up our internal market to foreign competition; and by giving individual enterprise more elbow room.

Government’s proper role is to provide the framework of political stability: the rule of law and official accountability; sound macro-economic policies; and an infrastructure of connectiveness.

All the rest should be up to individual and corporate effort.

A multi-year struggle

The UP economist Arsenio Balisacan estimates that if individual incomes can grow by 3.5% (which in our country is equivalent to about 6% GDP growth), it will take 15 years for the average Filipino poor to cross the poverty line to middle-class status.

Achieving this growth target is difficult – but not impossible. Our high-achieving neighbors have all attained this target over a period of one generation (or four presidential administrations).

Throughout the 1980s, for example, South Korea averaged 9.1%; Taiwan, 8.8%; and Singapore, 7.3%. In the 1990s, Thailand and Malaysia grew by similar rates.

As for China, over these last 20 years, economic growth has raised the lives of 270 million people – in the greatest mass emancipation from poverty the world has seen.

We Filipinos can match our vigorous neighbors in growth levels and poverty reduction, which we did before – during our “tiger cub” period from 1993 to 1997.

How can our war on poverty be won? By effective government that focuses on five essential tasks:

(1) Delivering primary healthcare and quality basic education to the poorest.

(2) Implementing rural development that brings micro-credit, irrigation and power, and farm-to-market facilities.

(3) Devising extension programs that raise agricultural production, and generate incomes off-season and off-farm.

(4) Following macro-economic policies that open markets and generate jobs; encourage investments/savings; and keep local industries competitive.

(5) Protecting OFWs everywhere with pro-active national policies and reinforcing our foreign relations.

Final words: Our OFWs

The trauma of our OFWS in embattled host-countries and/or places where they are still at risk (as in MENA and Taiwan) requires leadership of exceptional vision – to view the future as our socio-economic-cultural synergism with neighboring countries, with mutual benefits for all.

Abangan, next Sunday, Part II, with more on defeating poverty.

Please send any comments to fvr@rpdev.org. Copies of articles are available atwww.rpdev.org.

When in Cebu City, please visit gregmelep.com for your retirement and real estate needs. 

Muslim, Christian youths ‘hi’ on peace

By Sunshine Lichauco de Leon Philippine Daily Inquirer MANILA, Philippines—“It’s very overwhelming to communicate with Muslims [and finding] that they’re the same as me. It felt great. And they were just as overwhelmed with us. They really want to show that they are not the people we think they are. They’re the same as any of us. They’re not people we should be afraid of,” said Sandra, one of the Christian students participating in a mass videoconference. Almost 25 years to the day, a new kind of people power is beginning in the Philippines. This one is taking place “virtually,” on giant screens, instead of live on the streets, but the seeds of change that are being planted offer the same kind of hope. On Tuesday, 6,000 Christian and Muslim students and out-of-school youths from Metro Manila and Mindanao came together “face to face” for a videoconference, in a revolutionary use of technology that allowed them to build bridges over the gulfs of ignorance and discrimination. “Building Understanding through Technology” is a series of mass videoconferences organized by the Philippine-based PeaceTech, a nongovernment organization that is leveraging information communications technology (ICT) to educate, unite and reduce conflict. It is supported by the Australian government’s AusAid and the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process (OPAPP). It is aimed at building understanding between young Muslims and Christians who are divided by geography and background. The idea is to link up youths from a city in Luzon and the Visayas with those from a city in Mindanao. Tuesday’s event, one of the biggest to have been staged so far, involved Metro Manila and General Santos City. It brought together approximately 50 high schools, dozens of colleges, out-of-school groups, police, military, government, civil society and the private sector. Attitude-altering experience For many of the participating high school students—like Sandra who has never traveled outside of Metro Manila—it was the first time for them to communicate with people in Mindanao. Kimberly, a college junior, attended her first videoconference only because it was a class requirement. But what she discovered has changed her attitude and made her understand how easily discrimination, if left unquestioned, can be passed down through generations. “I have an auntie who dislikes Muslims. She hates mess, dirty things. She hates Muslims because she says they live in dirty places. And so of course, because I respect her, I unconsciously got that perspective. I tell other people the same thing. Whenever I encounter a Muslim, I would say to my classmate that Muslims are messy people,” she said. These unfounded judgments can easily be magnified, she said. “When we Manileños encounter them in Manila, we always avoid them. This is so unfair. Now I see Muslims as intelligent, I don’t see them differently and I really think they are happy people,” she said. Resembling a talk show At first glance, a mass videoconferencing event resembles a talk show. It uses moderators and guests in each city, along with entertainment, games and singing to bring people together. Unlike the typical talk show, however, the objective is serious—to use technology to educate, empower and unite. Singer Gary Valenciano, one of the guest performers, explained why he will continue to support PeaceTech. “This has been very powerful. Just when you think you have your own story to tell, you hear the stories of those down south. You realize how fortunate you are to not face the same problems. To be able to bring people together in this way using technology, I think this is the way it was meant to be used—it’s a great opportunity for young people to see the other side of what technology can bring,” Valenciano said. Participants from one city can ask questions of anyone on the other side. Participants in the “facing” city then stand up and respond. Some could be seen wiping tears from their eyes as they talked: “What can we do to treat you better? What do you think about Muslims? Why do you not like us?” Social outcasts The guests were Christians and Muslims alike, who were victims of prejudice and war. One guest, Jamail Kamlian, a professor of history at the MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology, sat with more than 3,000 young Filipinos in a gymnasium in General Santos City. He related how his Christian wife was barred from purchasing a house by a property developer because her husband was a Muslim. “I was not the buyer. My Catholic wife was the buyer. We were going to pay cash, not even installment. And then they find out that her husband was Muslim. They said, ‘Ma’am, we will return your money’. Even if you’re Christian but have some connection with a Muslim, you become a social outcast,” he said. Kamlian worries for his children: “In 20 years, they will be taking employment in a Christian-majority community. What will happen to them if they are not hired for the same reason?” From talk to action The ignorance and conflict are just the starting point at this mass event. It progresses to look at commonalities and then concrete solutions, which the audience propose to implement themselves. In this way, the event is not just talk. It becomes action. Already, participants are beginning their own peace-building projects: virtual puppet shows, mini-video documentaries about prejudice, online forums and youth videoconferences. Louie Montalbo, an undersecretary at OPAPP, explained the rationale for the event. “One of the first things that we had thought of as far as the peace process was concerned was how to involve the youth. To involve them you cannot use traditional media outlets. You needed to use the new technology, the Internet in particular. And PeaceTech’s using interactive media is the perfect opportunity. It allows us to tap into thousands of students to basically do what we had thought of doing on our own,” said Montalbo. He explains how this could also attack the roots of extremism. A personal story “Part of extremism is depersonalizing the enemy, so giving them a face, a name, a personal story, helps. To have a positive or at least neutral experience can help. You never know what ripple effect this can have,” he said. Montalbo admits that although government has a vital role to play, there are limits to what it can do in its peace efforts, and changing attitudes is the hardest. “You cannot legislate these things. It really has to happen from the ground up,” he said. Last week’s videoconference is not the only way PeaceTech is helping to effect change at the grassroots. It acts as a catalyst with its array of programs. Pairing classrooms At the core of PeaceTech is the Classroom Videoconference Program. In coordination with the Department of Education (DepEd), it pairs classrooms throughout Mindanao and Metro Manila. Students learn about discrimination and prejudice, what they mean, and how to identify and overcome them. Training sessions are also held for teachers, mostly from DepEd high schools. All programs are done with support from AusAid, OPAPP, the British Embassy and GTZ of Germany. A multiple series of weekend workshops teach young people project management and Internet skills. They learn how to use the Web to research, make new contacts and find answers to their questions. Beyond social networking The common denominator of all PeaceTech programs is to use technology in innovative ways to communicate and build understanding. This is where Montalbo sees the potential. “There’s a digital divide in the Philippines, but I believe in using technology to go beyond social networking or chatting. We’re divided by seas. Technology is a way of bridging that particular geographical gap,” he said. Founder Robin Pettyfer chose to begin PeaceTech in the Philippines partly because his British family were prisoners of war in Manila during World War II. “Unlike previous generations, young people today have an opportunity to connect with other people anywhere. Had this existed before, it might have slowed down the propensity for misunderstanding and war. Today, it is so much simpler to go over the heads of the few in order to reach the many, to question whether what we are being told about the ‘other’ is in fact true, and to learn that maybe we are more alike than we are different,” said Pettyfer. There is no doubt that the road towards more understanding is a long and complicated one. PeaceTech’s programs have so far reached only 20,000 people out of a population of 95 million. But sometimes hearing that one voice in the crowd makes all the difference, said Pettyfer. He told of how a teenage boy wearing broken shoes approached him after a videoconference in Mindanao. “Thank you very much for giving me a voice. I never felt that I would have one. I come from nothing and for the first time I speak with people on the other side of this country, I never thought they would be like that. Today you made me feel that I came from something, and that I matter,” the boy told him Source: Philippine Dadily Inquirer.

Frugal Living – Everyday Savings

Consumer Post

By SOL JOSE VANZI

February 27, 2011, 2:30am

 MANILA, Philippines – There are savings to be made in everything we do at home, from washing the dishes, preparing meals, to doing the laundry; all it takes is a few adjustments and a little time. These days, with the cost of everything going up, saving a bit here and there all adds up to easing the household budget and teaching the kids a better, more earth-friendly lifestyle as well.

LAUNDRY – Doing everything at home by myself has given me a lifetime of lessons on how to save on very important stuff: water, detergent, electricity and time.

The first tip is: dissolve the detergent in water before adding the dirty clothes. In the washing machine, this is done by running the tub for a few minutes while adding the powder detergent. Add the clothes when there’s no longer any trace of powder in the water. The aim here is to ensure that the detergent’s washing power is distributed evenly to all the pieces of clothing.

Never make the mistake of adding detergent to a washing machine filled with dirty clothes. The power will clump in the nooks and crannies, pockets and what-have-you of all the washables, making it virtually impossible to rinse them all off.  And think of the wasted cleaning power of the undissolved powder.

DRYING – After soaping and rinsing, drying the wash is another point where one can save money. When spin-drying, consider the weather outside. If it is sunny, spin-dry the batch only a couple of minutes, just enough so the items do not drip when hung. Use the power of the sun and the wind for drying whenever possible. If your drying area has limited space, take the time to rotate the drying clothes so each piece is touched by the sun and the wind during the drying period.

TO PRESS OR NOT – In our household, we hardly take out the electric iron to press our clothes. I stretch the clothes while they are hanging out to dry. Jeans, T-shirts, pants, blouses all come out creaseless. The system calls for stretching the clothes on the diagonal, this way and that way, while wet. Do it again after a few minutes to redo the stubborn parts.

My grandson’s white long sleeved shirts for school go to a neighborhood laundry shop which does it cheaper and more efficiently than if I had done it at home. For P80 per kilo (5 shirts), I pay only P160 for two weeks worth of uniforms that get washed, pressed and delivered to me in my own hangers. That is much less than I would have paid for an “extra” maid to wash and press them at home.

FOOD PREPARATION – Cook in bulk to save money on ingredients, time and fuel.

Cooking for six persons costs only a bit more than cooking for two; and with freezers, refs and microwaves, storage and reheating are no longer formidable problems.

For example, because there’s only me and my grandson in the apartment, it is impractical to cook rice every time we sit down for a meal. What I do is cook a kilo of rice in the rice cooker and pack the rice in solo servings once it cools. One minute on high is enough to zap one serving of rice to steaming. We cook rice only two or three times a week, and use the microwave a lot for reheating.

Cooking in bulk is great also for viands. Take Adobo, which tastes even better when reheated. This applies also to such dishes as Mechado, Menudo, Paksiw na Lechon,  Dinuguan, Paksiw na Isda, Kare-Kare and Kaldereta.

Pasta dishes and casseroles are also perfect cooked in advance, frozen and reheated when needed. Our other favorite pre-cooked meals are: Baked Macaroni, Spaghetti, Pasta Alfredo, Eggplant with Mozzarella sauce, Pizza, Beef Stew, Pot Roast and Callos.

FOOD PURCHASING – Nothing beats buying in bulk. The Filipino “tingi” habit of buying cigarettes by the stick, shampoo by sachet and vegetables by “tali” or “tumpok” means paying twice as much for the items.

Market prices are quite affordable when buying by the kilo or half kilo. This applies to vegetables, fruits, flour, sugar, oil, fish, chicken and meats.

Wash and gut the fish and freeze individually or in layers separated by wax paper or plastic. Meats should be frozen in thin layers, Season what has to be seasoned (Daing na Bangus, Adobo, Tapa) before freezing.

Vegetables and fruits should be cleaned of mature or wilting leaves, fruits and non-leafy veggies should be washed in water with mild detergent to get rid of surface soil and dirt. Air dry or blot with kitchen towels before packing and storing in the refrigerator.

Singles or very small families should find friends and relatives to share their purchases with, splitting the cost and transport expenses.

One can also save by not buying processed meats; it is much cheaper and more satisfying to make your own. You also get peace of mind, knowing what goes into everything you serve your family.