I wanted to hear (and I’m sure millions of other Filipinos did, too) President Aquino say in his State of the Nation Address last Monday how he intends to solve the acute unemployment problem in the Philippines. But beyond saying that an additional 1,165 million Filipinos were employed from April 2013 to April 2014, there was nothing more. Yet unemployment is our biggest problem and the cause of widespread poverty. Solve it and you also solve a lot of other problems.
Our unemployment rate is 7 percent—one of the biggest in the world. That means that 7 million out of 100 million Filipinos are unemployed. Every year, millions more enter the labor force. Every year, millions more babies are born who will need jobs when they grow up. We urge our young people to finish schooling, but after they graduate there are no jobs waiting for them. Filipinos are forced to leave their families to seek employment abroad, where they sometimes end up in prison, beheaded, abused by their employers, or trapped in the fighting in the Middle East.
And yet the Aquino administration brags that it has one of the biggest economic growths in the world. What good is economic growth if it does not provide jobs for its people and lift them out of poverty? Only the rich are benefited by the so-called economic growth. In the Philippines, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer every day. Where is all the money produced by the economic growth going?
Employment has a multiplier effect on the economy and society. It will quickly solve poverty, expand the economy faster, end many other related problems such as squatting, crime, poor health and education, high prices, and persistent lack of food, especially rice, and save the government billions of pesos otherwise spent for poverty alleviation. People are forced to commit crimes, big and small, because they have no jobs. Give them jobs and they won’t steal.
When people have jobs, they would have money with which to buy the products manufactured by our factories and other business companies. With bigger sales, these companies would expand and hire more people to manufacture more of their products. The people would have money to send their children to good schools and feed them more nutritious food; the health of family members would improve, which means they would get sick less often and the government would spend less for their healthcare. They would have money to build their own homes, thus ending the squatting problem. The tracts of land freed from squatters would then be put to better use. Filipinos would not have to leave their families to work abroad to be able to put food on the table for their loved ones.
Ironically, the most neglected sector of our society is the sector that produces our daily bread—the farmers. Farmers are the poorest of Filipinos. Young people desert the family farms, where the work is backbreaking but the earnings small, to look for jobs in the cities where they end up as squatters. That is why the squatter colonies in the urban areas keep getting bigger. The Conditional Cash Transfer program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development reaches some of the poorest of the poor in the urban areas, but not those in the rural areas.
Create jobs for the people in the countryside and we will end the squatting problem. Squatters in the urban areas will go back to their homes in the provinces. We will also have self-sufficiency in food. The DSWD won’t have to spend billions of pesos as alms for the poor. Filipinos are a proud people. They don’t want to accept alms from the government; it makes them feel like beggars. But since they are jobless and have nothing to eat, they beg.
The Philippines is probably the only country in the world where a good number of citizens survive by scavenging in garbage dumps and eating throwaway food recovered from the trash.
Give them jobs and they won’t have to do all that. Jobs will give them back their dignity.
Create jobs in the countryside by giving the farmers a better chance to earn enough for their needs.
President Aquino and all the other presidents before him have forgotten the farmers. Yet they are the backbone of our society. Without them we would have no food on our tables. In other countries, farmers are among the well-to-do sectors of their societies. In the Philippines, they are among the poorest of the poor in spite of the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program. They have been forgotten and neglected by their government.
President Aquino also forgot to mention them in his Sona and, in fact, in the plans for the future of his country.