Fumbled head counts

“The true test of civilization is not the census,” Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted. “[Rather], it is the kind of man that the country turns out.”

Like Renato Corona? At the impeachment trial, lawyers of the Supreme Court chief try to square the circle for him. They’ve crammed pricey condos, choice lots and sealed dollar accounts within Corona’s fixed salary—with scant success so far.

A census can induce M-E-G-O (“My eyes glaze over”). Yet, head counts are crucial to fraud-free elections or deciding how many classrooms to build.

Look at our 12 head counts since a 1903 census tallied 7.6 million of us then. The delayed 2007 census counted four Filipinos where there was one after World War II.

There were 101.8 million Filipinos last year, Index Mundi claims. The World Bank, however, pegs the 2012 population at 93.2 million—closer to the National Statistical Coordination Board’s “guesstimate,” anchored on “2000 census based projections.”

Why do we still fiddle with this decade-old census? Didn’t the last—but two years overdue—head count report a population of 88.5 million in 2007? Then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo signed Proclamation 1489 for that…

“UN projected there’d be 86 million of us by 2010,” Viewpoint noted (Inquirer, 4/21/08). “But birth rates declined slower than other countries. Proclamation 1489 shows we crossed that marker in 2005—five years earlier than predicted.”

Below-the-surface misgivings roil scientists. Political warlords grounded census teams. A high rate of nonresponse bugged census enumerators. “We didn’t count everyone,” admits an official.

At the Philippine Population Conference, demographer Mercedes Concepcion and colleagues blasted Maguindanao’s  “statistically impossible” 5.4-percent increase in population. Most “newcomers” were 18-year-olds—therefore new voters. In the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, numbers sprinted by 3.7 percent. In contrast, 19 Asian countries reported population declines.

“Voodoo demography” derails comparison with previous censuses. Policymakers, scientists and local leaders, meanwhile, fly blind. Yet, this policy crafting by the seat of one’s pants can be avoided. How?

President Aquino monitors the drive to gouge out the corruption canker. This is essential. Ask those who track the Corona impeachment trial. Beyond scorched-earth measures, however, the President must build. He has limited time and must multitask. He can, for example, dust off the report of the last national census, conducted May 17-June 14, 2010. It has moldered on the President’s in-tray.

Malacañang’s inaction on the 2010 census hobbles planners for nutrition, health, fisheries down to the barangays. They’re handcuffed to obsolete data, culled from the 2000 census—and 2007 enumeration results. The Department of Education, for example, is hard-pressed to get hard data on the number of the school-age population.

Don’t fidget, counsels the National Statistical Coordination Board. Wait for the release of the 2010 census results. By August 2012, statisticians will have the detailed tabulations of the 2010 results completed. Everyone can construct projections then.

“Our hands are tied until the President gets around to declaring the 2010 results official,” say social scientists. “Barangay to provincial planning offices scrounge for data vital for action programs. We cannot supply them.” The Philippine statistical system is hogtied.

And don’t forget: The National Statistical Office is already planning for the mid-decade 2015 census! That’s only three years away. Si viene atrasao, hueso ay come, the Chavacano proverb says. “He who comes late eats the bones.”

This is underscored when one surfs the US 2010 Census. A flick of the mouse can get the population broken down by states, towns, counties, even blocks. In contrast, one hits a blank wall on our 2010 census.

Filipinos can ill afford feet-dragging on reforms. Today, “children … are born into deeply unequal societies and live out their lives hampered (or, in the case of a privileged few, aided) by collective perceptions, conventions and stereotypes,” Unicef warns in its 2012 report on the “State of the World’s Children.”

Over 1.7 million children huddle in Metro Manila slums. Impoverished rural migrants and children cascade into urban centers like Olongapo to Batangas, and Davao.

One out of three kids huddles in a shack atop a rubbish dump or even a cemetery. “The number of the poor and undernourished wears an increasingly human face,” the Unicef study notes. The ill-fed poor are “increasing faster in urban than in rural areas…” Even the well-fed can suffer the “hidden hunger of micronutrient malnutrition.”

Natural disasters drove 42 million people from their homes in the Asia-Pacific in 2011, the Asian Development Bank notes. Among countries at risk are the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), Thailand and Vietnam. Temperature increases, changing rainfall patterns, sea-level rise, and more intense tropical cyclones will drive future migration patterns. Countries with high population density and long coastlines, like the Philippines, will bear the brunt of such changes.

History tells us a census can anchor key events. “At that time, the emperor issued a decree for a census of the world to be taken,” Luke wrote. “Joseph set out from Nazareth … to be registered with his wife Mary … in David’s town of Bethlehem.”

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