Aggravating the poverty problem

By Herbert Vego

YESTERDAY’S TV newscast showed residents of Tagkawayan, Quezon rushing to evacuation centers to escape the wrath of super typhoon Pepito. Among them was a mother of five minor children. Her husband, she cried, had become jobless. How would they survive?

I could not help but empathize with her anxiety. I remembered my own experience as a young husband who lost a job, with no more money to buy the next meal for my and our baby boy.

But I now call that “misery” a blessing in disguise.  It forced us to practice family planning, knowing that overpopulation is one of the causes of our country’s poverty problem.

The population of the Philippines today, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), has exceeded 119 million, which is a 1.51% increase from 2023. As the 13th most populated country in the world with a growth rate of 2.3 percent annually, we represent 1.42% of the eight billion world population.

Compared to the 2020 Philippine census which revealed a population of 109,035,343 as of May 1, 2020, it means we have grown by 10 million in only four years.

We Filipinos have various ways of interpreting this problem. A statement from the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) insists, “Population is not the problem. It’s the great disparity of wealth. If the wealthy would share what they have, then population would not be a problem.”

Well, while it may not be “the problem,” it is a problem nevertheless.

It is a problem ignored by the Roman Catholic Church which condemns artificial family planning as “anti-life.”

I remember the late Jaro Archbishop Angel Lagdameo, who preached, “The social doctrine of the Church challenges society and government to regard the population not as mere consumers but also to help and facilitate their becoming producers and formal businessmen.”

Nevertheless, that wistful thinking is easier said than done. It does not erase the undesirable situation where poor couples make more children than they can afford to feed and send to school — a cycle that replicates itself from one generation to the next.

Doesn’t even common sense tell us that a worker making barely enough bread for himself is unfit to marry and multiply? The new family consequently becomes a burden, not an asset, to society.

In the book, “Hey Joe,” a collection of Asian travel stories, American author Ted Lerner relates the plight of Nina, an unwed 30-year-old mother of 10 children who migrates from Bacolod City to Angeles City, ending up as a paramour of an American serviceman.

“Almost anywhere one travels in the Philippines,” Lerner writes, “you could select women at random and you’d likely hear similar stories.”

Conversely and ironically, it is the rich in the Philippines who limit the number of their children to two or three to ensure their good future. That probably explains why only 10 percent of Filipinos are believed in control of 90 percent of the nation’s wealth; and 90 percent survive on 10 percent of its wealth.

Ironically, other predominantly Catholic countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy and Poland control their birth rates despite the clergy’s admonition to refrain from using church-banned contraceptives.

I was 10 years old in grade four in 1960 when I first learned that the Philippines had a population of 30 million. This means that, between 1960 and today, the aforesaid population that took centuries to accumulate has quadrupled in only 64 years!

Our neighbor Thailand, on the other hand, which had about as many people as the Philippines in 1960, has only doubled its population at 72 million. This proves that Thailand, which is predominantly Buddhist, has a more active population management.

See? We now import rice from Thailand because we no longer produce enough of it.

So, should we still insist that population is not our problem?

-oOo-

MORE POWER DOES NOT DESERVE THE BLAME

EVERY time power brownouts strike Iloilo City, we hear people cursing MORE Electric and Power Corp. (MORE Power). The more brownouts, the more curses it gets for a fault not its own.

Power users forget that like ILECO and other distribution utilities, the company does not produce electricity. It buys from power plants which transmit it via the facilities of the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP).

The NGCP, on the other hand, has been in the habit of apologizing for its failure to perform as expected due to “maintenance work” that could not be done without power interruption.

According to a Rappler report by our good friend Ambo Delilan, it’s all aimed at building “a robust power transmission network that could meet the growing demands of the country.”

Don’t blame us for doubting, Ambo. It has already been 25 years since the privately-owned NGCP took over what used to be the government-owned National Transmission Corporation (Transco) in 2009.