Allow me to commend the Inquirer’s June 17 editorial (“8.1 billion”).
The Inquirer did a great service to the Filipino people by focusing on the crucial subject of the movement of the world’s population in general and of the Philippines in particular.
It ought to be of great concern to the “Establishment”—composed of Filipinos who control the levers of power in the country—that the population of the Philippines, going by the United Nations’ projections, will grow by about 1 million every year in the 90 years between 2010 and 2100, to double from today’s 93 million to 187 million.
The reality is that even with its present population of around 93 million, the Philippines has deservedly earned the pejorative distinction as “The sick man of Asia,” with around 30 million Filipinos caught in the sticky quagmire of poverty, living lives of extreme degradation and dehumanization.
If as the United Nations projects, its population will double by 2100, imagine the percentage of the extremely poor of the total population by then, at about one-third of 187 million; in absolute terms, that scary number will be around 63 million!
Obviously, the Philippines has taken a development path during the last 67 years or so which has not led to the kind of solid, enduring and inclusive progress achieved by its neighbors Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea—dubbed the “Asian economic tigers,” and now also by Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
What the Philippines sorely needs is to follow the clear example of its successful neighbors, all of which have carried out imaginative, creative and aggressive national industrialization programs moving parri passu with imaginative, creative and aggressive national population control programs.
There is no way the Philippines could get out of the rut of poverty if the “Establishment” continues to remain clueless or dismissive of these two national programs.
—MARIANO PATALINJUG,
MarPatalinjug@aol.com