Rural and Urban Poverty in the Philippines

Reprinted from the Asian Journal

(Second of two installments)

Last week, I jotted down statistics on current Philippine economy that stagger the mind. The richest 10% of the country earns twenty times more than the poorest 10%. Networth of the 40 richest Filipinos amount to $16 Billion U.S. currency, equivalent to the combined annual income of 9,600,000 families or 49 million Filipinos. Other stats claim that assets of the top 10 Filipinos alone ($12.4 billion) compare to the total earning capacity of 57% of the population!


Statistics can lie. They can be tweaked or fudged to make one side look better than the other. However, I see how these numbers translate into actual flesh and blood when we embark on medical missions to the Philippines. Whether we conduct our missions in outlying barrios or in city slums, the sheer volume åof malnourished children -- an unmistakable index of poverty -- is astonishing.

In the heart of the slum district of Baranggay Pasil, Cebu, early this year, we visited the orphanage run by the Missionaries of Charity (of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta). (see photos). We witnessed first-hand how the Sisters take care of toddlers who cannot stand, much less walk, because of advanced kwashiorkor. Some of the children looked like old men and women, with prominent eyeballs in sunken orbits -- like the ones you see photographed in famine areas such as Ethiopia and Darfur.

These children are not orphans. Their parents have not abandoned them. They simply do not have the resources to feed them. So the Missionary Sisters take them in and care for them for a year or so until they are healthy enough to return to their families.

Many Filipinos who live in the relatively affluent areas of Metro Manila, Cebu, Davao and other major cities do not readily see the extent of poverty afflicting the rural areas of the country. Residents in Cebu and Manila enjoy many luxurious amenities not easily found in major cities of the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

This fact may have been part of the impetus that compelled the CBCP (Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines) to issue an important Pastoral Statement on 28 January 2007. Drafted by the Archbishop of Jaro and CBCP President, Angel N. Lagdameo, D.D., the document is entitled “The Dignity of the Rural Poor -- A Gospel Concern”. It is a letter addressed to the “People of God in the Philippines” but may well be addressed to Filipinos residing outside of the Philippines as well.

The document, which I found displayed on the bulletin board at the Pontificio Collegio Filipino in Rome, states that “the overriding social concern of the Church of the Philippines has...centered on the inequitable distribution of the nation’s wealth and the endemic social injustices that underpin that evil.” The paper focuses attention “on the greatest victim of our unjust economic order, the rural poor, and the diminishment of their dignity as people and as citizens.”

The Pastoral Statement goes on to say that the poor are concentrated in the rural areas of the country. But while the ranks of the urban poor are also increasing, that situation is largely due to the migration of rural folks seeking job opportunities in the metropolitan areas.

Archbishop Lagdameo and the CBCP laud the government for instituting CARP (Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program) but lament that “its full implementation is still far off in the future -- if ever.” The government’s failure to carry out land reform is in no small measure due to “a landlord dominated Congress (which) watered down..its implementation.”

The “landed classes” which comprise the “traditional and economic elite of our country” lack the “vigor and determination” to implement the law. Simply put, “selfish class interests outweigh concern for the common good...”

The paper condemns “recent extrajudicial killings, perpetrated by groups from both the right and the left.” Farmers who struggle and fight for the implementation of land reform are considered a seditious threat to the economic elite and become targets of government sanctioned military campaigns. The same farmers also become targets of leftist brigands if unable to pay the “revolutionary tax” imposed on them by the NPA.

The bishops point out that condemnation of this structural evil in Philippine society is not enough. “We must,” they insist, “try bringing an end to evils that harm people and their good.”

The year 2007, the bishops remind us, is the 40th anniversary of the 1967 National Rural Congress. At that time, the Congress reached the “crucial conclusion that the Church must go to the barrios..(because) the rural part of the country were the most neglected by both the government’s development programs and the Chruch’s pastoral care.”

The Pastoral Statement concludes that “it is in not honoring the dignity of the least of our brothers and sisters among the poor that we contribute not a little to the injustices and inequalities that have become deeply ingrained in our national life.....”

Citing the Scriptural message from St. Matthew: “If you did it for one of my least brothers or sisters, you did it for me,” the bishops declare that “today, we see only too clearly the need for the reform not only of our national institutions but of our very moral fiber as a people.”

There are countless ways, big and small, that we can help alleviate poverty in the Philippines. The Missionaries of Charity orphanage needs food, medicine, clothing, cribs, shoes, etc. For those concerned and interested in helping the orphanage in Pasil, Cebu, you may send your contribution, in cash/check or goods, directly to:

Sr. Ruth, MC
Missionaries of Charity
Bgy. Suba Pasil
Cebu

Tel (032) 261-9097