Still, the poor

All the furor around Mamasapano is justified, but it seems to have eclipsed so many other important national issues and developments, notably the release last March 6 of the latest poverty report of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA).

Using figures from the government’s Annual Poverty Indicators Survey (Apis), the PSA reports that poverty incidence was higher in the first semester of 2014 (25.8 percent of the total population) when compared with the first semester of 2013 (24.6 percent).

(Poverty is defined as having incomes below what is needed, a threshold level, for basic needs. Besides the general poverty threshold level, there is a more specific one for food.)

The figures are not surprising, but I have wondered if we are becoming so inured to the point of being numb to the poverty statistics. Numbers are numbers, and we forget that for a population of about 100 million, those poverty figures mean we have some 25 million Filipinos living in poverty.

We forget, too, the consequences of such large numbers living in poverty, including civil unrest and Mamasapano. When that unrest explodes into war, as it is doing now in Mindanao, it is mainly the poor—Muslim or Christian—who suffer the most.

Poverty’s paradoxes

I worry about the paradoxes of poverty in our times, and how it adds to the concealment of poverty. The statistics show that Filipinos’ average incomes have been on the rise, and we have much more cheap consumer goods to spend on, from the “bounties” of ukay-ukay (imported used clothing) and Japan surplus stores to the almost disposable, made-in-China electronic products.

One of the Inquirer’s columnists, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, wrote recently about how, thanks to ukay-ukay, household helpers sometimes look better dressed than their employers. And she’s right. The other day I was driving past the urban slums along Quirino Avenue and saw a woman emerging from a tiny hole in the wall, dressed like a socialite heading to a ball, down to stiletto heels. I’ve visited these slums and could not imagine how she had navigated her way through the mud and the cracked pavements.

I’ve seen, too, the homes overflowing with consumer goods: cell phones, TV, DVD player, sometimes even electronic games for the children. Some of the products are cheap Chinese knock-offs, but others are “origs,” Japanese originals using 110 volts and therefore requiring transformers, bought from the “pier” (the port area near Intramuros).

The website of the PSA, which was formed last year by merging all government agencies involved in the collection and analysis of statistical data, has a new look: still loaded with statistics but with some awareness of the need to make the figures “sexier” (the PSA people’s own term). I suspect this may have come in part from the prodding of their “big boss,” Lisa Bersales, who was borrowed from the University of the Philippines Diliman’s School of Statistics to head that agency.

I especially appreciate a section “behind the statistics” that gives a human face to the numbers. An article by Jose Ramon Albert is especially useful for a deeper grasp of poverty in the country.

By comparing poverty figures across the years, Albert is able to describe how people move out of, as well as into, poverty. Between 2003 and 2006, for example, he estimates that some 6.5 million Filipinos moved out of, and 6.8 million moved into, poverty.

Transient, persistent poor

Given these movements in and out of poverty, Albert estimates that some 23 percent of the population belong to the “transient poor” while 15 percent are “persistently poor.” Some 86 percent of the persistently poor live in rural areas.

The transient poor are those who are vulnerable to disasters, sudden price movements and unemployment. I suspect these are the ones who may be considered part of the middle class, small- and medium-scale entrepreneurs, for example, and civil servants, who may be comfortable today but who quickly descend into poverty because someone in the family becomes unemployed, or comes down with what are called, appropriately, catastrophic illnesses (for example, cancer). It is the middle class about which Senators Edgardo and Sonny Angara have raised alarm signals, a “fragile” sector that is overtaxed and underpaid, with few social security nets.

Albert writes about the poor’s coping mechanisms, such as pawnshops, or cutting down on expenditures, with adjustments mainly made around food. (Nutrition surveys do show how the poor consume much more of instant noodles.)

Unfortunately, one budgetary item that also seems to be easiest to cut is the children’s education. I see that all the time in UP, with students’ letters explaining that they may have to drop out, or apply for a loan, if they are not allowed late tuition payments.

There are many faces of poverty. In rural areas, it is grinding poverty that makes people live in chronic despair. I am still haunted by memories from my college days, of working in a remote town called Paracelis in Mountain Province, and daily passing a house with an elderly Gaddang woman looking blankly out of the window, her vision practically obliterated by cataracts. She also had oral cancer. She had nothing, and I mean nothing, by way of material possessions.

In contrast, I’ve described the illusions of urban poverty: nice clothes, cell phones, households with appliances, even in the slums.

As a nation, too, we can project illusory “affluence.” I am amazed at the number of luxury cars on the road, many with names I have never heard of. Balikbayan relatives also tell me that they are hard-put to find stuff to bring back to the Philippines as gifts, considering that local stores like Rustan’s carry more of the high-quality goods from the United States and Europe, and at lower prices, than in their own stores.

Unless we understand that people do move in or out of poverty for many reasons, unless we understand poverty as relational—you have the very poor because you have the excessively rich who are not helping enough with poverty alleviation—then what happened in Mamasapano will be interpreted only as executive incompetence, rather than the product of decades of economic and political inequities.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph