Fresh paradigm needed

President Aquino’s latest State of the Nation Address was remarkable in a number of ways, not the least of which was its going for the visceral: He delivered it completely in Filipino, in an effort to communicate to those of us whose intelligence resides primarily in the stomach. Instead of abstract measures like GDP growth, the achievements detailed were concrete and to the point—more jobs, more classrooms, more roads, more rice production, achievements made more impressive because contrasted with the long and maleficent record of the past administration.

It is tempting to dismiss these as a mere list of to-dos for a normaadministration. It is easy to fault it for what was missing: a larger sense of vision, an overarching principle, or even just a programmatic framework behind the touted statistics.

It could be argued that there was in fact a bigger frame that held all the discrete facts presented: the idea of “inclusive growth,” of enlarging the economy while first putting the basic needs of the poor—jobs to keep their heads above water, education to break the cycle of poverty for the next generation, roads and market accessibility for the poor farmer and trader, food security for all, and the promise of regional airports and better infrastructure for tourism, which happens to be one of the fastest ways of generating jobs for those whose only asset is the labor of their hands.

The President himself summed these all up as the social and economic dividends of his “daang matuwid.” It is truly cause for rejoicing that corruption can be punished, that justice can now be had by both the poor and the powerful. One psychological gain of the will to put power behind good governance is what the Italian Camilo Cavour once said about a necessary trait for a statesman: “a sense of the possible.” Given the kind of governance we have been used to, it is indeed a novelty to believe that what used to look impossible before can now be done.

But a hint of a cloud shadows this upbeat picture of what is ahead. Like the low-level discomfort of off-stage noise, it comes to the fore when things like modernizing aircraft and other military hardware get mentioned, or when so much is made of our credit ratings and standing abroad. While we must certainly defend our territorial waters and provide our soldiers decent pay and equipment, one wonders where the money for these big-ticket items is coming from, and at what price. More debts loom, our confidence to borrow boosted by our newfound standing as a lender to the European emergency rescue fund.

Similarly, while we do not despise “the day of small things”—the many little changes that are happening, wrested inch by inch, from the recalcitrant forces that have beset us since the dismantling of martial law—we sense that something has yet to change fundamentally in the way we approach the problem of growth and poverty.

It has been more than half a century since US President Harry Truman inaugurated the “development age” and the Bretton Woods institutions that would preside over it. The optimistic projection that poverty, injustice and ignorance shall inevitably get wiped out as societies clamber up this train of evolutionary progress as prophesied by Walt Rostow has yet to show up.

Past globalization and the economic meltdown, the rise of underclasses in Europe and the unrest in Wall Street, even western economies are discovering that enlarging the pie will not necessarily have a “trickle-down” effect for the poor. We all have been lured into this unilinear idea of “development,” thinking that the way the West has developed can be universalized, and the problem of the poor solved by technology and merely market forces.

Certainly, the crumbling of socialist economies tells us that imperfect market mechanisms are better than imperfect governments in creating wealth. But recent experience also tells us that growth can exist alongside increasing hunger.

In much of the past decade, from 2003 to 2009, for instance, the economy grew by an average of 4.8 percent, but the poor increased from 19.1 million to 23.1 million. Mahar Mangahas of the Social Weather Stations has observed that the Philippines’ economic crisis is not so much in terms of finance, which mostly threatens the rich, as in the form of hunger, which is suffered by the poor. This has prompted the searching question raised at a Philippine Development Forum by the international donor community: “How come there is rising poverty and hunger in the midst of growth?”

Part of the complex answer is the type of development we have been pursuing. Modernization is not always good for the poor. Even when government-sponsored growth results in unequivocal good, this still tends to bypass the poor. As an expert observes:

“The benefits of economic growth in the formal sector of Third World economies tend to bypass the poor because modern-sector development projects, even those that are designated projects of national significance, do little to improve the productivity of the poor. A new power plant, a new hospital, improved seaport facilities, a new airport terminal, or a new timber mill may augment the standard of living of bureaucrats, the captains of industry, skilled workers and professionals in the formal work force, but will make barely a difference to the value-added generated by the firms that employ the poor, produce for the poor and sell to the poor.”

Clearly, in a context where great social and economic imbalances exist, development initiatives will tend to benefit only a thin layer of the elite classes. Long ago, Gunnar Myrdal, speaking out of the caste system in India, already found that no amount of technical solutions can work within the disincentives posed by systemic inequality. “Greater equality,” he said, “is a precondition for lifting a society out of poverty.”

It was once said, quite prematurely, that we are at the “end of history”; the once deadly ideological battles that used to preoccupy us are over. What is before us are only boring technical questions of how to make economies grow.

No, the massive poverty that surrounds us demands a fresh paradigm that restores the poor at the center of our vision. We sense the seriousness of the Aquino administration in wanting to see to it that no one gets left behind. But this will not happen unless it has a clear and fresh sense of where we should be going and how to get there, apart from the development path others have marked out for us. This is the framing element we have been missing, and wish to hear, in future Sonas. Sana…

Melba Padilla Maggay, Ph.D., is a social anthropologist and the founder and president of the Institute for Studies in Asian Church and Culture. E-mail her at [email protected].