Babe's Eye View article

FVR’s warning about the “ticking time bombs” is true, but not entirely accurate. Most of this country’s problems have been with us for so long it’s almost impossible for GMA to solve them even if she tries. The widening gap between rich and poor, diminishing water and natural resources, corruption, environmental degradation, rising prices, continuing conflict in Mindanao—all these are traceable to one simple fact: too many mouths to feed, too much poverty and erratic economic growth.

As far back as 30 years ago, Time magazine had already described the Philippine situation as a social volcano waiting to explode. In fact, during the time of President Diosdado Macapagal, we already had a similar food crisis particularly with rice. After losing to Ferdinand Marcos, Macapagal was asked if the Americans ever intervened in his administration, and he answered, yes—when they postponed delivering the rice until after the elections in 1965.

The fact is, this ticking time bomb has been with us for so long and with almost every president, from Marcos to Cory, FVR to Erap and now GMA. It’s a question of which president will be left holding the bag when it explodes. People thought EDSA I and II will change everything overnight, with the ills of this country swept away by the “winds of change.” We now all know there’s no quick fix solution to problems which have become more complex over the years.

Even if by some miracle the Church, the government and everybody agree that we need to manage our population, this bomb will continue to tick. But, at least, we will be buying time to allow progress and food production to catch up with the growing number of people. Today, all we have to do is look around us and see the growing incidence of poverty and hunger as shown by recent Pulse Asia surveys. This is obviously exacerbated by the global fuel and food crisis.

Anyone who knows simple arithmetic can figure it out, but a lot of people continue to bury their heads in the sand and refuse to accept the facts. In the 1960s, when our economy was second only to Japan, our population was 27 million. But this number kept increasing at disturbing proportions: 36.6 million in 1970; 48 million in 1980; 60 million in 1990; 68 million in 1995; 76.5 million in 2000; and today, 90 million Filipinos. In five years, we will reach the 100 million mark. In spite of that, we have not been able to catch up in developing agriculture. In fact, food production has been neglected with not enough farm-to-market roads and irrigation facilities.

In fairness to FVR, it was during his time when the population time bomb slowed down. But today, it’s ticking at four babies a minute. We have one of the highest population growth rates in Southeast Asia at 2.3 percent compared to 1.2 percent for Indonesia and Singapore, 1.7 percent for Malaysia and 0.6 percent for Thailand which had almost the same population as the Philippines in the ’70s. Today, they have 25 million less people. Everyone who has visited Thailand had seen their progress precisely because they managed their population growth.

The Sulpicio Lines tragedy is probably the best metaphor to what our country is like. It’s an old ship that needs to be modernized, but more people continue to board it, and all it took was a major storm and it sank. We don’t want this to happen to the Philippines—but it can happen. The reality is, the AB social brackets have less children than the DE crowd. And most of the middle class are either working abroad or just waiting to leave. In 10 years, it will be so lopsided that the wealth of this country will probably belong to less than five percent of the population—a perfect formula for a social time bomb to explode.

The area of education is where this disparity is more vivid, with more children needing education through the public school system but there are just never enough classrooms. In fact, Education Secretary Jesli Lapus complained to me that even if he had the biggest budget, we can’t cope with the number of children going to school every year, with the 18 million today increasing rapidly. They say education is the great equalizer, but the irony is that there are many who cannot afford to go to school or can’t go because there is no school—a vicious cycle where no education spells more poverty.

Again, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the cost of everything—from fuel to rice, food, water and other basic commodities—is driven by the law of supply and demand. With increased demand from a growing number of consumers but with less food production, the result is obvious.

By 2050, there will be 9.1 billion people living in this world, increasing the demand for food and water. Together with climate change, you could see a disaster coming. Of course, with the advances in science and technology, perhaps the day will come when people will be able to live on the moon or in Mars. As a matter of fact, the joke is that people will be migrating to Mars instead of other countries.

The Philippines is hardest hit when there are food shortages because we depend so much on imports, neglecting our agriculture sector despite the growing number of people. It is said that a hungry man knows no laws. And unless we come up with reasonable long-term solutions to address the complex problem of overpopulation, poverty and hunger, this social time bomb ticking every minute can explode anytime.