The Philippine Online Chronicles

I have this feeling that those patchworks in the “squatters” areas that pass off as dwellings are actually factories churning out babies!

I see these children daily in the afternoon fill up the basketball court, with some even spilling into the street. The scene is the same around and near the three other squatters areas and I suppose in other barangays as well.

The children seem to be a happy lot, running around, playing tag and other improvised child’s games, teasing and taunting each other, laughing like they have no care in the world. Alarm bells ring, however, as I get close. Most of them are skinny with ruddy skin and bronze hair and sunken eyes; their clothes look like hand-me-downs for they are either too large or too small, their muddy feet shod in slippers worn thin or about to break into pieces.

Patently they are poor as “… poverty and large families tend to reinforce each other,” says environmental analyst Lester Brown.

By October of last year 7 billion people would have been sharing the “Earth’s land and resources.”

This is bad news to some parts of the globe like Burundi, Uganda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa as the “region suffers under the double burden of the world’s highest birthrates and deepest poverty.” Uganda President Yoweri Museveni now rues the day he urged Ugandans, “especially in rural areas… to have large families,” only to be confronted by protests as the economy can’t keep in stride with a burgeoning population.

Other “high-growth developing nations such as Afghanistan and Pakistan will be hard-pressed to feed, supply water and create jobs for their people.”

Although “it’s totally manageable for the rich,” John Bongaarts of the New York-based Population Council says “strains are intensifying – rising energy and food prices, environmental stresses, more than 900 million people undernourished.”

In Western Europe, Japan, Russia, China and India whose policies have “slowed once-rapid population growth, the worry now is about “low birthrates and aging population.” Too few young people to take care of too many old people.

There is this thing demographers and policy makers call the “youth dividend.” A population of young people under 25 years old “could fuel a productive surge over the next decades,” they aver.

But if these young people “are not provided with education, training and health care”, they could become instead liabilities, merely “hordes of unemployed young people,” according to Ndyanabangi Bannet, UN Population Fund’s deputy representative on Nigeria (whose 60% of the population is under 30) and one could just imagine what they can do.

Harnessing the youth is one big task as they are almost in “slums where living conditions are horrible,” where opportunities are just not there, plus governments that are indifferent or just plain lazy, functioning through mere sloganeering.

“Now I have laid the issue in the hands of God,” says Godelive Ndagaraniwe of Burundi who laments having a large family. The venerable F. Sionil Jose, however, says “it’s not so much the population as the poverty… that should be attended to” by those white-cassocked men with “big fat cigars.”

The children I see daily flock the basketball court and street may act happy and sound boisterous but I have this feeling also that they are a hungry bunch. If I could press my ears to their bellies, some of them unnaturally bloated, I could get to hear their grumblings.

“Hunger up,” says the latest SWS survey, with 22% of respondents (almost 4.5 million families) going hungry, “having nothing to eat,” this despite the much-vaunted Conditional Cash Transfer program of the lady with the blue-today-red-tomorrow streak of hair, which as of December, 2011, has doled out 13,093,184,200php to supposedly poor families nationwide.

My barber says the CCT is nothing but a gargantuan campaign war chest, elections being just two years away.

At least the children in our part of the barangay are a bit luckier. Their families may self-rate themselves poor but I could see from where I stand they belong to the 3.57 million families who, according to the survey, experienced “moderate hunger,” with nothing to eat a “few times,” as against families living dismally under bridges, atop “karitons,” in cardboard box lean-tos propped against walls, and like circumstances who experienced “severe hunger,” having nothing to eat “often” or “always.”

Our population number may not yet be like a ticking bomb but if there is this increase in bulging stomachs along the Pasig river banks, my barber says with a malicious wink of an eye, it could be because of a brisk sale lately in the area of pirated CDs of the kind that shoot up libidos.

One of my favorite writers who dishes out terrific columns without wrecking chairs, Ms Barbara Gonzalez, talks about “transgenders,” … “creatures who do not see themselves as gay or lesbian but who genuinely feel themselves to be members of the opposite sex,” as differed from “homosexuals… who are attracted to the same gender.”

One is contented with what he/she has, the other “needs an operation” to become happy with what she/he is. Transgenders, says Ms Gonzalez, may be the beginning of the end of the world’s population surges.” Think about it, she says. Boys transformed into girls, and vice-versa, get married, have all the sex they want and yet don’t get to produce babies. Neat, huh?

Sources:

AP, Challenges loom.., Inquirer, October 17, 2011

Hindset, F. Sionil Jose, Inquirer, November 16, 2010

Second Wind, Barbara Gonzalez, Philippine Star.

Philippine Star,January 28, 2012

Photo: “pregnant woman” by Montse PB, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved