The Philippine Online Chronicles

President Benigno Simeon Aquino III’s government appears to have the penchant of mobilizing the country’s resources for dole-outs and popularity-saving schemes under the pretext of government subsidies. Problems that need concrete solutions and decisive policy reversals are instead addressed by the administration with various short term and palliative measures.

Even the administration’s flagship anti-poverty program, the P21 billion conditional cash transfer which seeks to cover 2.3 million households is an ambitious dole-out scheme. Reports said that each family beneficiary under the CCT, will receive a maximum of P21,000 in yearly cash assistance representing P6,000 a year or P500 per month for health and nutrition and P3,000 for one school year of 10 months or P300 per month per child for a maximum of three children or a total of P1,400 per month or P15,000 yearly.

Another case in point - at the height of protests from the transport sector, came the P450-million Pantawid Pasada Program launched by the Aquino administration. This was a short-term subsidy of as much as P1,200 for public utility vehicles operators, to cushion the effects of skyrocketing oil prices instead of decisively confronting the decade-old oil deregulation law.

The Pinag-isang Samahan ng mga Tsuper at Opereytor Nationwide (Piston) said the program does not address the problem and that they preferred a freeze or the imposition of controls on oil prices and the suspension of the value-added tax (VAT) on oil.

“We believe that the fuel subsidy will not give adequate relief to jeepney and tricycle drivers because President Aquino did not really resolve the problem of uncontrolled rise in prices of oil products in the country,” Piston secretary general George San Mateo said.

Similarly, the impending rice crisis alerted by the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency itself was immediately dismissed by Aquino’s multiple mouthpieces and bragged of importing hundreds of thousands of metric tons more of rice while slashing the National Food Authority’s budget from P8 billion in 2010 to P2.5 billion this year.

The latest of the dole-out programs is a P4.23 billion rice subsidy to 10 million farmers and fisherfolks to offset rising fuel and food prices, which the President announced on Labor Day. This, was Aquino’s “good news” after rejecting demands for a substantial wage increase and price controls demanded by workers and the Filipino people.

In his Labor Day speech, the President said, the funds “will be used to pay the fishermen and fisher folks’ wages in exchange for their services such as the preparation and cleaning of the farms to be used during the next planting season.”

Two days later, on May 3, the Social Weather Stations released its latest survey showing a steep decline in the net satisfaction ratings of the one-year old Aquino administration.

The survey conducted from March 4 to 7 showed that the administration’s net satisfaction ratings, compared to the previous quarter, plunged by 27 points in Luzon (excluding Metro Manila) from +69 to +42, by 20 points in Mindanao from +67 to +47, and down by 8 points in the Visayas from +59 to +51. In Metro Manila, however, the net satisfaction rating stayed from +49 to +50.

By socio-economic class, the administration’s net satisfaction ratings tumble by 43 points among the upper and middle class or class ABC from +62 to +19. In class D, the ratings dropped by 18 points from +64 to +46, and by 15 points or +65 to +50 among the poorest class E.

Seemingly disturbed by the writing on the wall, Department of Social Welfare and Development Secretary Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, on May 6, announced that “starting May 15, some two million small-scale farmers and fisher folk nationwide will benefit from the P4.23 billion ‘Rice for Work’ program of the Aquino administration.”

Soliman, in a report by the Philippine Daily Inquirer, said this was part of the government’s efforts to ensure decent meals for these families despite the surge in the costs of basic commodities.

Farmers and fisherfolk will also be enlisted to work in government infrastructure projects to provide them income before the second cropping starts in the fourth quarter of the year, she said.

Insult to producers

For an activist lawmaker, the Aquino government’s rice subsidy program for farmers is “an insult to the rice producers themselves” and betrays the government’s inability to implement genuine reforms.

“The Aquino government is exploiting farmers’ situation in order to utilize billions of taxpayers’ money in a corruption-prone rice subsidy program similar to the fertilizer fund scam and the conditional cash transfer scheme,” said Anakpawis party-list Representative Rafael Mariano.

“This exposes the Aquino government’s failure to address hunger and poverty and inability to implement genuine reforms,” the Anakpawis lawmaker said.

“It is the height of irony that farmers, the rice producers themselves, are now being targeted by the government’s so-called rice subsidy,” Mariano said.

“Instead of addressing demands for genuine agrarian reform and direct agricultural support to farmers, Aquino further insults the people behind the plow by giving them crumbs,” says Mariano, who also chairs the peasant group Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas.

Mariano, main author of House Bill 374 or the proposed Genuine Agrarian Reform Act, said that “the free distribution of lands to farmers through genuine agrarian reform will directly help farmers feed themselves and their family and unleash the capital in the land that will serve as a strong foundation for the development of the national economy and support national industrialization.”

The government’s wastage of billions of public funds under the guise of "subsidies to the poor" does not hit poverty at its roots. It is also doubtful whether these funds directly reach its intended beneficiaries, the poorest of the poor.

There is no dearth of alternative and concrete solutions to the increasing poverty and hunger shouldered by the Filipino people. The Aquino administration only need is a strong political will to implement genuine social and economic reforms.

Image taken from roger_alcantara on Flickr. Some rights reserved.