Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.'' This is a popular Chinese saying, and presumably the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration knows this, but it chose to ignore the truism of the saying when it announced a P5-billion aid program for the poor. The program would give stipends of up to P1,400 monthly to the poorest families in the 20 poorest provinces. This is likely to promote dependency and indolence. Instead of fostering self-reliance, it would promote the "dole'' mentality among the poor. It would perpetuate the problem of poverty.

A better, though not the ideal, solution would be to immediately employ the poor in government projects. This way they will have some income but they will have to work for it.

A massive, nationwide reforestation program would kill two birds with one stone, in a manner of speaking. It would give the poor jobs and at the same time help reverse deforestation which is destroying watersheds, thus aggravating the water shortage, and help prevent the flooding of agricultural lands during the rainy season.

Another urgent project is the building and rehabilitation of irrigation projects. Again, this would give the poor instant jobs and at the same time provide the country with an expanded irrigation network that would help increase rice production and thus relieve the current food problem.

In the cities and other urban areas, the poor could be deployed, as suggested by Fr. Anton Pascual of Caritas Manila, to sweep the streets, collect garbage or declog canals and other waterways. In the provinces, some of them can be hired to clean the bays and the beaches and make the seas safe again to swim in.

A short-term vocational and technical education program would give the poor the skills needed to get jobs. The ideal solution would be to extend the skills training now being provided by the Technical and Skills Development Authority to the provinces so that the poor could have their own livelihood projects. At the same time, they should be trained to become small entrepreneurs and given access to loans that could be repaid on easy terms. Part of the proposed P5-billion subsidy for the poor could be converted into a loan fund for small entrepreneurs.

The P5-billion aid program for the poor is not a sincere effort to help the less fortunate sector of our society. It is nothing but a publicity gimmick to improve the image of the Arroyo administration that is being badly affected by the current food crisis. It could also be, as the opposition and militant groups are saying, a dress rehearsal and trial balloon for vote-buying projects similar to the fertilizer fund scam and the PhilHealth cards gimmick in the 2004 elections. These did not help the poor but made instant millionaires of some officials.

Poverty has been a perennial problem of the country which, ironically, has rich natural resources and a skilled work force. About 11 million Filipinos or roughly 13.5 percent of the population are living on less than $1 a day (about P42 at the current exchange rate), the threshold defined as extreme poverty by the United Nations. About 7.4 million, or 9.1 percent, are subjacent poor (those living on 75 US cents to $1 a day) and 3.6 million, or 4.4 percent, are medial poor (those living on 50 to 75 US cents). There is no figure available for the ultra poor, or those living on less than 50 US cents a day.

Poverty hits the children the hardest and about 300,000 of them die before their fifth birthday each year because of hunger and malnutrition. (All the above figures were obtained from the UNICEF and the Program for Calculating Poverty Measures from Grouped Data website, a compilation of poverty data from country household surveys and posted on the Web by the World Bank.)

Education, training and entrepreneurship assistance are among the answers to the problem of poverty. If the Arroyo administration sincerely wants to help the poor, it should teach them how to earn a decent living, and not make them dependent on government doles for their entire lives.