We must balance order and mercy

What happened around Iloilo Terminal Market was not just another clearing operation gone bad, because once a city reaches the point where goods are confiscated, a vendor is hauled to the police over a reported knife threat, and an enforcer ends up nursing an injury after being hit by produce, the real story is that policy has already broken down long before tempers did.

The city government is not wrong for enforcing the 100-meter rule, protecting sidewalks, and keeping order around a busy public market, especially when the Local Economic Enterprise Office (LEEO) says transient vendors have been selling in prohibited areas and formal stallholders have complained that outside selling pulls customers away from the market itself.

That complaint deserves respect, too, because the Iloilo Terminal Market Vendors Association said transient selling has cut the income of some inside vendors by as much as 70 percent, and people who pay rent, fees, and comply with rules should not be made to feel that legality is a handicap.

But a city that wants to be taken seriously about inclusive growth cannot stop the conversation there, because the LEEO itself has acknowledged that more than 300 transient vendors are in its database and that not all of them can be accommodated inside the market, which means this is not a fringe issue but a structural one that the city has known about for some time.

That is why the Tuesday “market day” solution feels too small for the scale of the problem, since one day of legal selling may look neat in a policy briefing but sounds painfully detached when measured against the daily arithmetic of poor families who buy rice, viand, and medicine from what they earn that same day.

The broader numbers help explain why this tension keeps returning, because PSA data show that 27.4 percent of employed Filipinos in February 2026 were self-employed without paid workers, while 11.8 percent were underemployed, meaning millions were already working but still looking for more hours or another source of income.

Even in urban areas, poverty is not some abstract provincial problem left behind by growth narratives, with PSA reporting a 10.3 percent poverty incidence among individuals living in urban areas in 2023, which should caution every local government against treating informal work as mere stubbornness instead of what it often is, a survival strategy.

That is the uncomfortable contrast here, because Western Visayas posted 7.2 percent economic growth in 2023 and Iloilo City itself was among the country’s fastest-growing highly urbanized cities at 10.5 percent, yet those bright numbers clearly have not erased the desperation that still pushes people to fight for a few square meters of selling space.

None of this excuses violence against enforcers, and no one should romanticize threats, thrown goods, or intimidation, but government also has to admit that repeated nighttime confiscations without a credible transition plan practically invite confrontation and force frontline personnel to absorb the anger created by a policy gap above their pay grade.

Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu now has a chance to prove that order need not come at the expense of compassion by rolling out a plan with clearer rules, available stalls, legal vending spaces, de-escalation measures, and a firm timetable for fair treatment of both stallholders and transient vendors.