Monday, August 30, 2010
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Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE PHILIPPINES? AN ESSAY BY BENIGNO AQUINO JR. (+August 21, 1983)
HAS ANYTHING CHANGED SINCE THEN?
What’s wrong with the Philippines?
By Benigno S. Aquino Jr.+
Philippine Daily Inquirer
(reprinted from Solidarity, 1985)
Posted date: August 21, 2010
MANILA, Philippines—A diplomat, after a seven-year tour of duty in the Philippines, once christened the islands as an “enchanting archipelago.” Whether he was merely being polite, or had succumbed to government pitchmen, or had himself become enchanted by the lush tropical beauty of the islands, he should also have seen a country wracked by afflictions, some common to all countries engaged in the desperate race to develop, some peculiar to the Philippines.
Purveyors of the rosy picture continue to roll out endless statistics and charts to depict a growing economy, a country on the move. A portion of this view may even be accepted, considering that the Philippines, with all its imperfections, is only 21 years old as a free republic. The trouble is that there is one vital natural resource that has not been properly developed: the people.
Beneath the outpourings of self-serving government data, hidden underneath the trappings of the good life in the big cities, there remains a depressed and dispirited people. Against the yardstick, not of statistics but of quality of life, the Filipino people as a whole are a melancholy—if patient—mass. Their daily diet is monotonous (rice, fish, vegetables), their clothes are threadbare and their homes primitive and crowded. What could they hope to build on a daily per capita income of just over 25 cents? In sum, the blessings of liberty do not include liberation from poverty.
Foreign gadgetry and other luxury goods continue to flood the cities, and more people travel, despite current government restrictions. But this only serves to dramatize the great disparities and chronic inequities of Filipino society. Indeed, the Philippines is a land of traumatic contrasts. Here is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. Gleaming suburbia clashes with the squalor of the slums. Here is a land where freedom and its blessings are a reality for a minority and an illusion for the many. Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite. Here is a land of privilege and rank—a republic dedicated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste.
Caste spells bondage. Of this the contemporary Filipino is well aware. And to break through—to rise out of this bondage into the next higher social stratum—is the ambition of the tao, the Filipino common man. For him, education appears at first the ticket to his aspirations, and parents sell their last worldly possessions, even go deep into debt, to see a son or a daughter through college. But each year, no less than 65,000 swell the ranks of this army of the discontented, educated unemployed. Unemployment runs up to a million, while the under-employed represent 20 to 25 percent of the population, largely in the rural areas. The upsurge of the communist Huks in Central Luzon is but one chilling manifestation of peasant disillusionment. Another is the recent wave of crime which has converted the country into a land of terror in time of peace.
Add to this a government which is financially almost bankrupt, state agencies ridden by debts and honeycombed with graft, industries in pathetic distress, prices in a continuing spiral and there is good reason for the Filipino to feel sapped of confidence, hope and will. The new, young Filipino leaders who exhort their peers to be activists, and not to give up, are greeted with apathy and indifference.
In the early thirties, Manuel L. Quezon, as he led the fight for independence, once raged: “I would rather have a country run like hell by Filipinos than one run like heaven by the Americans.” The father of his country did not live to see this preference realized, but his political heirs have. Since independence, Philippine presidents have logged a grand total of 14 national plans and all they have to show for them is a nation that looks, sounds, and feels discouraged. It is confused by the multiplicity of its cravings, and concerns, floundering in haphazard attempts to modernize and innovate.
Government apologists predictably will disagree with these conclusions. Great strides have been made, they will maintain, and they can indeed produce the required statistics to back up their claims. But the assertion that development is accelerating is only partly correct. “Orderly growth and evolution require delicate synchronization,” Filipino economist Sixto K. Roxas has cogently argued. And this is precisely what is wanting in Philippine economic planning.
Champagne taste on beer income
The truth is that there has been no organized, no methodical over-all economic planning. At best, all that our previous planners have trotted out have been limited programs which, tragically for the people, have bred individual hustling and pushing while the overall economy ran inconclusively in every direction. The result has been impasse in the development of critical sectors of the economy, such as the metal, chemical, wood, plastics and food industries.
For a people who at independence set out to pursue the American way of life as the ideal, the Filipinos—21 years later—are nowhere near the mark. “We are,” one Filipino declared in self-reproach, “a people with champagne taste, operating on a beer income.” Actually quite a number of Filipinos cannot even afford beer.
The annual per capita income is less than $100, less than Communist China’s today and equal to Japan’s only way back in 1910. The gross national product grows between 5 and 6 percent per year, but it is offset by a ballooning population increasing at a rate of 3.4 percent per year, one of the world’s highest. The GNP growth, in fact is hardly enough to absorb the backlog of unemployed and underemployed, to say nothing of improving the people’s standard of living.
Who’s to blame?
Fault, if it must be fixed, belongs not to any single man or people. It lies in the fabric of the society—and in what went into its making. Too many Filipinos are without purpose and without discipline. They profess love of country, but love themselves individually—more. When then Senate President Jose Avelino, in an expansive mood, exclaimed, “What are we in power for?” and when much later President Carlos P. Garcia defended a Cabinet member’s right to “prepare for his future,” these leaders were articulating a common outlook.
Without a soul
The responsibility belongs also to those who came, conquered, and ruled—to America as much as to Spain. For all the good they did (Spain welded and Christianized the people, America democratized them), they are responsible for the worst in the Filipino. While bleeding them, they molded the Filipinos in their own images, Spain Hispanizing, and America Americanizing the natives. Almost half of a century of American rule bequeathed to the Asian Filipino a trauma by making him uncomfortably American in outlook, values and tastes. What was left was a people without a soul.
Filipinos are bewildered about their identity. They are an Asian people not Asian in the eyes of their fellow Asians and not Western in the eyes of the West. They are in Asia, but they know more about the Statue of Liberty than about Angkor Wat in Cambodia; more of the lyrics of Whitman than of Tagore or of their own Nick Joaquin; more of Patrick Henry’s soul-stirring liberty-or-death oratory than of the ageless wisdom of Confucius or Lao-tze. Lately, they have taken to insisting they are Asian but they are so American-oriented that—by reflex—they still react and respond like little brown Americans.
Except for the hyper-nationalists, the Filipinos actually take pride in their community—if not identity—with the Americans. When President Johnson applauded President Marcos as his “right arm in Asia,” there was some derisive reaction from nationalist quarters but, in the main, the people took it as a badge to wear proudly on their sleeves. GI Joe at Clark, at Mactan, at John Hay, at Subic and at Sangley, America’s military bases in the Philippines, remain a symbol of American protection. Herein lies the bigger Filipino problem.
Legacy of the West
Too many Filipinos are given to dodging their responsibilities, running to others for help when they should be on their own feet. This, too, is a legacy of the West. The writer Renato Constantino has put it well: “As a people, we have been deprived for centuries of responsibilities for our destiny. Under the Americans, while ostensibly we were being prepared for self-government, for self-reliance, actually we were being maneuvered by means of political and economic pressures to defer to American decisions (and) being conditioned by our American education to prefer American ways.’’ The result is a people habituated to abdicating control over basic areas of their national life, unaccustomed to coming to grips with reality, prone to escape into fantasies.
Some conjecture that a more tragic fate might have overtaken the Filipinos if Spain had not stumbled upon them in 1521—a fate perhaps, some shudder, like that which befell Indonesia, Indochina, or the Congo. There is nothing to support this speculation; the fact is, the navigator Fernando Magallanes found on these islands well-ordered societies with their own culture. He was slain on Mactan island by a Filipino, Lapu-Lapu, the first Asian to fight and defeat a Western invader. But the Spanish king and Cortez were bent on empire and, in historian Arnold Toynbee’s words, “The Philippines was held for Spain by a handful of soldiers, administrators, and friars after the fashion of the Spanish empire of the Indies.”
With the cross and the sword, Spain stamped out the native culture, commerce and government. The people’s codes and laws, their weights and measures, their literature and even their alphabet were destroyed. There were, of course, periods in Spain’s 377 years of domination when liberal governors ruled, but in the main, Spanish rule was oppressive. No less than two hundred revolts marked the Spanish rule; the last—the Katipunan Revolution of 1896—finally broke Spain’s reign with American military help.
Frying pan into the fire
Filipino jubilation was short-lived, however. A republic was proclaimed by the victorious revolutionaries on June 12, 1898, but the Spanish-American War had already cast its shadow over the Filipino destiny. In the Treaty of Paris of 1898, defeated Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 million over vociferous but futile Filipino protests. “The Filipino freedom fighter,” comments Toynbee, “now found that they had fallen out of the frying pan into the fire.”
From the very beginning, Washington officials denied any ambition of empire. They rationalized their Pacific acquisition as a humane and civilizing job. President McKinley, so it is recorded, dropped on his knees and prayed to God for guidance. “And one night,” he said, “it all came to me this way—that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”
Hokum or truth? A good number of Filipino patriots rejected America’s proclaimed benevolence and kept up the guerrilla fight for independence not only in the mountains but also in their newspapers and literature. In their struggle, they drew moral backing from diverse foreign powers including Imperial Japan, which gave sanctuary to fleeing Filipino rebels.
After “pacifying” the islands (except the hinterlands of Muslim Mindanao), America set out to refashion the Filipinos. In this there was method as well as design. American teachers came first, followed by American missionaries, then by American public officials. So successful were they that the Filipinos were soon thinking, acting, and living American. And so proud was the United States, it was soon calling the country America’s “showcase of democracy” in Asia. The Filipinos liked the label too, such had been the degree of their Americanization.
Filipinos, indeed, have much to thank the United States for. With “the happiness, peace and prosperity” of the Filipinos as the official colonial policy, America gave the Filipinos a new language, schools, free trade, government and laws. It strove to curb disease. It also gave the Filipinos a vigorous journalism, something Filipinos point to with pride. Branded as irresponsible at times, the Philippine press nonetheless has been the unofficial loyal opposition, the strongest deterrent to unbridled graft. And most important, perhaps, the United States kept the regionalistic and volatile Filipinos from breaking up.
Mentor’s neuroses
What if the United States had not come and the First Republic in 1898 had not been aborted? Philippine Ambassador to Washington Salvador P. Lopez, who, as foreign secretary, charted the Philippines’ dramatic turn away from the United States and back toward Asia, answered “... the Philippines would have developed a political system resembling, on the one hand, the self-perpetuating oligarchies of Latin America and, on the other the ‘guided democracy’ of Indonesia. In addition, the young republic would have been confronted almost immediately by challenges to its authority, in particular by serious separatist movements in the Visayas and in Moslem Mindanao and Sulu.” American colonial rule, he affirmed, moderated all these and permitted a new “Philippine society to develop along more democratic lines.”
What the United States fashioned, in fact, is a democratic plural society, a society that finds unity in its diversity. It is a society, some say, as American as the United States itself. It may not have the dollars, but it certainly has the tastes and habits, the wheelings and dealings, the idiosyncracies and neuroses of its recent mentor. And it is —or has been—committed four-square to America, to what America stands for—more than the United States itself, perhaps. In its anticommunism, for example, Manila is more rigid than Washington.
In three wars, the Philippines has stepped forward and fought with the United States—against the Japanese in the epic holding battles of Bataan and Corregidor, against the North Koreans and Communist Chinese in Korea, against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese now. Clearly, President Marcos voiced the Filipino sentiment when he explained why he brought the Philippines into the Viet Nam war: because, he said, the United States was already in the fray.
Increasingly, however, there are signs of disaffection from the United States. Where it was almost unthinkable to criticize America 10 years ago, more and more Filipinos speak out today against the Americans, if not America itself. The change is seen in anti-American demonstrations and in the search for new partners in Asia and in Europe. Behind it, too, is a renaissance of Filipino nationalism and a growing awareness of where the country is—in Asia. But the main reason is the failure of the United States —in Filipino eyes—to give meaning to the vaunted special relationship; American performance falls short of the promise.
Built-in strings
In this atmosphere, the negative aspects of US policy are surfacing. Approval of parity—equal rights for Americans in the exploitation of Philippine natural resources—is now seen as imposed by the United States on a people left prostrate by World War II, as a condition for American War-damage funds. “The net effect of parity,” Education Undersecretary Onofre Corpus warned the United States, “has been an erosion of the Filipinos’ belief in the United States’ capacity for fair dealing with her friends and allies.”
Filipinos in growing numbers now believe that the independence granted by the United States in 1946 had built-in strings designed to perpetuate American economic dominance—or “colonialism,” as the ultra-nationalists call it. And they point to the trade agreement which has kept the Philippines a supplier of raw materials for American’s mills and a market for American goods. Of course, the onerous provision of the original agreement was rewritten in the Laurel-Langley pact of 1956, but very few Filipinos understand this refinement.
A few Filipino ultra-nationalists, well-positioned and very articulate, would sever all special relations with the United States, putting the Philippines on the path of non-alignment. This of course, is foolhardy. With the nuclear-armed and power-minded Communist China casting a covetous shadow over all of free Asia, the Philippines needs the United States more than ever; the only other choices left to her are to go Red or fall dead.
One truth persists here: the Philippines like the rest of Free Asia, needs America’s continued military presence in the area. Like the others, she needs America as a dam and shield against the Chinese Communists. This need has never been more urgently felt than since President Johnson’s dramatic announcement at the end of March and the beginning of negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Will the United States pull out, as the French and the British have done? This is the common fear of free Asians. For the Filipinos, with a million Chinese unassimilated in their midst, it is more than a fear; it is a spectre.
Breaking the fetters
The Philippines today needs to make bold efforts to break away from the fetters of the past. She must review and revise her so-called special relationships with the United States, taking into account the world as it is, and ceasing to live on the myths and heroics that so welded and so sustained her in the past. The Filipinos ask simply for dignity in their relations with the United States and equality with others in the American-led community of nations. They resent the fact that Japan, a former enemy, has obtained more from the United States than has the Philippines, and that Spain, a totalitarian state, has a more favorable military bases agreement with the United States.
The Filipinos must purge, now and with finality, the cause of their past shame: US puppetry. What they must seek is partnership with the United States, not wardship. If a fresh viability can be forged out of the old tissues of past kinship, so much the better. But this should be farthest from both the Filipino and American minds. A New Spirit must be infused into the Filipino and American relations of today. And it must be applied to the new mutual defense and military bases agreements. These are the main problems that have vexed Filipino-American relations so much in the sixties; approached with a fresh outlook, they could yield a more durable Filipino-American relationship.
Happily, despite the growing swell of anti-American criticism in the Filipino press, there is no hatred for whites on the islands. This is because, it would seem, Americans neither tyrannized nor brutalized the Filipinos in their 48-year rule. In fact, Filipinos, in the main, fondly remember the Big Brother gestures and kindnesses of the GI who liberated the islands in 1945. Out in the country especially, the Americano is still as much a symbol of help, friendship and good will as ever. As before, this is a good augury.
Much to be done
There is much to be done at home. In addition to breaking away from America’s economic dominance, the Filipinos themselves must outgrow the colonial attitude which now impedes the modernization process. Fortunately, there are many latent forces which can be energized. Anyone who has lived in the Philippines will attest to the flexibility of the Filipinos and, most of all, to their great social mobility. There is, on the whole, an openness in the society, the creation no doubt of the egalitarian ideals of the Revolution of 1896 that have slowly seeped into the whole fabric of Philippine life during the last six decades. And this can be ascribed to the public school system which the Americans installed but which the Filipinos have molded to fit their own psyche and needs. We have, after all, been having democratic elections since 1911; many governments have come and gone without the chaos and bloodshed of revolutions and coups d’etat.
There are perhaps more trained technicians in the Philippines today than anywhere else in Southeast Asia, but the industrial growth that can absorb these technicians has not come. Moreover, the Philippines’ natural resources are among the richest in Southeast Asia, yet we are fast falling behind such countries as Malaysia and Taiwan in industrial development. Here, again the oligarchs must be made to move, to invest, to industrialize. They can be captains of industry, but instead they have elected to dig in their heels on the land.
Stirring the entrenched oligarchs into accepting the urgency of land reform is also one of the aims of the younger leadership which wants the Philippines to surge upward. Up to now, however, forces of reaction have made government efforts in this direction largely meaningless. What a few years ago was a mere revolution of rising expectations has grown to the point where some fear revolution itself. It could be sparked, not by the left, the communist-inspired Huk ideologue, but by the disillusioned, depressed and dejected educated unemployed. Clearly, the Filipino elite—the corrupt and corrupting, the irresponsible and unresponsive old leadership—must face up to the need for reform or be swept away.
The new-generation Filipino must also shake and awaken the Catholic Church, which has long ignored the need for social reform and become flabby in its position of revered irrelevance. Because the Church has grown remote from the masses, quasi-religious fanatics have banded together and prospered in the countryside. Last year 31 of them—members of the Lapiang Malaya (Freedom Party) sect—were slaughtered when they demonstrated in Manila and charged the constabulary dispatched to contain them. This was as much a failure of the Church as of the government.
The government itself must be made to respond to the demands of the middle class for a mass market. The archaic and regressive tax structure must be revamped. The wealth that the oligarchy rapaciously covets and hoards must get down to the masses in the form of roads, bridges and schools; these are what the tao understands as good or bad government.
Where salvation lies
Philippine democratic institutions, President Marcos feels, are on trial. “And they may not,” he has warned, “have a second chance to prove and sustain themselves.” The Filipino, he stressed, “must realize his salvation lies with himself.” With this, the opposition cannot disagree. Indeed, great dedication and great labor are demanded of the new Filipino.
All these are Filipino aspirations and frustrations that the Americans must clearly understand. It is they, after all, to whom the Filipinos have always turned for guidance and assistance. In handling the Philippine problem, it will be well for the United States to remember that methods and postures that have repeatedly failed in contemporary Asia cannot any longer work in the new Philippines either. Equally, the Filipinos will do well to keep in mind that invoking the dead—if epic—past will no longer work in this age of rapid revolution. For them sentimentally to rest their future and fortune on the special Filipino-American bonds and other myths of the past is likely to be fatal.
(End of Essay as reprinted by Philippine Inquirer)
---o0o---
(Did these ideas or those enunciated by the late Senator Beingno Aquino Jr. somehow raise hackles where the powerful had fears of not being able to maintain its grasp on "the puppet Philippines"? Why --- after all those "official enquiries" made in the Philippines through several governments --- have they never pinpointed the senator's assassins or their masters? Were these ideas the bases for the fear held against the impending Presidency of the late senator when President Marcos became too sick to hold the office? Too much like the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy, Ninoy Aquino's poses a welter of unanwered questions. 20 years after Kennedy's assassination, Aquino's execution at the Philippine airport in 1983 was just too similar for comfort. A theory is being bruited about: whoever finds out who got Kennedy killed will also find out who ordered Aquino's killing. Will President Aquino move mountains to find out? the late lamented Bobby Kennedy tried to do the same for his dead brother. He got killed, too. Just asking. ---ABC)
Monday, August 16, 2010
A SPECTRE IN THE OFFING --- GLOBAL WARMING AFFECTS FOOD PRODUCTION, JOURNALIST SAYS
What will happen to food production as global warming adversely affects regions considered to be the bread baskets of the Earth? In the previous post, media played up the incidence of natural disasters all over the globe. These are veritable warning signs that need the attention of people on this planet and planning by their governments, assuming they are still functioning.
Veteran Filipino journalist Juan L. Mercado gives us a microcosm of some dire results of this global warming and its impact on food. Food production in the tropics could be imperilled, and the colder regions on the planet could pitch in. But could they?
This is an issue that the United Nations Organization must focus on with urgent intensity. It is not only an inconvenient truth at this point; it is a frightening possibility within our lifetime.
SHIFTING TROPICS
By Juan L. Mercado (The Philippine Inquirer 14 Aug )
“The promise of food lies in the tropics,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization director general said at the University of the Philippines. “Here in this sun-drenched belt of land, temperature is benign and rainfall abundant. These could be the food granaries for the world of our children.”
Not anymore.
Rising temperatures have widened the “Tropical Belt, “notes Nature Geoscience.. Since the FAO official delivered his Los Baños address in May 1979, the tropics expanded by between 2 and 4.8 degrees latitude. As the world warms, edges of the “Belt” -- outer boundaries of the subtropical dry zones – drift towards the poles.
Temperature and rainfall changes are altering yields. . Affected are politically-volatile crops like corn and rice “In the Philippines, rice yields drop by 10% for every one degree centigrade increase in night-time temperature”, BBC’s environment correspondent Richard Black writes.
The slump is region wide. As droughts dry reservoirs, yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years. More declines are ahead.
"We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop." Researcher Jarrod Welch said. In fact, where “temperature increases more than 3C, impacts are stressful to all crops and in all regions, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded
Currently three billion people live in the tropics and subtropics. They’ll nearly to double by the end of the century. How many more Filipinos will need food then?
The National Statistical Board asserts there are 94 million of us today. . No, sir, it’s 99.9 million, counter some US and international bodies.
The squabble stems from the flawed 2007 census. An “implosion” of voting age (18 years old) residents in Maguindanao for example, shoved growth rates to triple national levels. That skewed the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao demographic profile.
“There’ll be rude surprises in the 2010 census,” predict demographers at UP, Xavier, and San Carlos Universities. All agree there are five Filipinos today where there was one in 1940. We’ll breach the 100 million mark sooner rather than later.
The sea level has risen rapidly, Vital Signs points out. More than half (55%) of sea level rise “results from the melting of glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets”. This happened in tandem with pollution, acidification, and changes in seasonal water cycles.
Seventy percent of Filipinos cluster in coastal areas. Seaside resort owners are bewildered as sea water encroaches into front yards. Reclamation project calculations, in Lapu-Lapu City and elsewhere, now look shaky.
Fishermen are reeling from the impact. “Warming of sea water is associated with El Niño episodes. These caused coral bleaching on massive scales never seen before,” notes Ocean Heritage.
El Nido reef, for instance, once had 60-70% coral cover. El Nino, a decade ago, stripped that down to 5-10%. It has not recovered to date. Sea surface temperature in Bolinao, Pangasinan, ranged between 34.1 °C to 34.9 °C. That grilled giant clams.
“Mercury and lead emissions, from coal-fired power plants, particularly in the inner seas of the Visayas” will ravage fisheries further. Unmet protein needs from depleted fishing grounds are dumped on stressed farms..
Formation of severe storms could double. Remember “Ondoy” last year and “Basyang” as this year’s storm cycle began? Warmer climates will bring changes to rainfall and resulting drought. “It’s best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain,” Mark Twain once joked.
But it’s not funny that the “most extreme summers of the last century could become routine towards the end of this century”, predicts the University of Seattle. What would be summer 2100 in the Philippines be like?
One thing is sure. Today’s glut of 41 million tons of rice, recklessly imported by the Arroyo administration, would not be possible. Rice exporters will find their capacity sapped.
Filipino policy makers must move beyond politics-as-usual concerns. Executive and legislative agendas need to face up to gut issues. Water shortages, soil erosion, adaptation to, or mitigation of, weather change matter more than coddling Supreme Court justices by unqualified towns itching to be cities.
There are biological limits to what can be done. . "We can't just move all our crops north or south because a lot of crops are photosensitive.” notes Dr Geoff Hawtin at International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. “Flowering is triggered by day length”.
Will Russia and Canada, with their colder weather regimes, turn out to be the world's bread baskets tomorrow? Would the poor of Asia and Africa be able to pay for imports?
“The race is on to breed maize which can tolerate the heat of future summers”, says James Morgan, BBC’s science reporter. Countries are urged to maintaining maximum level of genetic diversity. Seed banks is a good insurance policy, providing options for developing future strains.
There is a potential for heat tolerance in”beans, legumes, sorghum, millet --- anything which grows in an environment subject to drought.”
Adapt or starve is the ultimate option that an altered tropical belt could offer. "You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it," said Seattle’s Professor Battisti. "You could also mitigate it and not let it happen in the first place.
"We are not doing enough… We don't know where the tipping points are,” Hatwin adds, “They could come quite quickly."
(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com )
JUAN L. MERCADO started his journalistic career as a reporter for one of the community papers in Cebu. He then joined the staff of Evening News, serving first as a Senate reporter, then later as associate editor. Mercado was the first director of the Philippine Press Institute (1965-1972). He instituted PPI's first training programs as well as hands-on courses that helped facilitate coverage of sensitive beats like street demonstrations, the stock exchanges, the police and military.
He continued writing exposes on graft and corruption in government using the Philippine News Service as outlet, while still PPI director. Among the more notable stories he wrote were: the plight of sacada workers in Visayan sugar fields; customs corruption and widespread leakage of questions in a (nationwide) civil service examination for professionals.
He joined the Press Foundation of Asia as its Joint Chief Executive and started (DEPTHnews), an experiment in developmental journalism. He worked as editorial director of the service.
Mercado also served as correspondent for the Financial Times of London; the Honolulu Star Bulletin as well as The Bulletin of Sydney in Australia.
He was among the 22 journalists detained in the first wave of arrests by the Philippine martial law regime. Upon his release, he became communication officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Bangkok, Thailand. Thereafter, he was posted in FAO Headquarters in Rome, Italy as Attaché d' Cabinet.
Juan L. Mercado graduated from the University of San Carlos, Cebu City. He also took special courses at the American Press Institute in Columbia University in 1964 and at Henry Kissinger's foreign policy seminar at Harvard University.
He was named Journalist of the Year by Manila Rotary Club and received an Outstanding Alumnus Award at the University of San Carlos in 1970.
Source: Press Club Golden Jubilarians (thesis prepared by students of Miriam College) with revisions by. J.L. Mercado
This is an issue that the United Nations Organization must focus on with urgent intensity. It is not only an inconvenient truth at this point; it is a frightening possibility within our lifetime.
SHIFTING TROPICS
By Juan L. Mercado (The Philippine Inquirer 14 Aug )
“The promise of food lies in the tropics,” the UN Food and Agriculture Organization director general said at the University of the Philippines. “Here in this sun-drenched belt of land, temperature is benign and rainfall abundant. These could be the food granaries for the world of our children.”
Not anymore.
Rising temperatures have widened the “Tropical Belt, “notes Nature Geoscience.. Since the FAO official delivered his Los Baños address in May 1979, the tropics expanded by between 2 and 4.8 degrees latitude. As the world warms, edges of the “Belt” -- outer boundaries of the subtropical dry zones – drift towards the poles.
Temperature and rainfall changes are altering yields. . Affected are politically-volatile crops like corn and rice “In the Philippines, rice yields drop by 10% for every one degree centigrade increase in night-time temperature”, BBC’s environment correspondent Richard Black writes.
The slump is region wide. As droughts dry reservoirs, yields have fallen by 10-20% over the last 25 years. More declines are ahead.
"We found that as the daily minimum temperature increases, or as nights get hotter, rice yields drop." Researcher Jarrod Welch said. In fact, where “temperature increases more than 3C, impacts are stressful to all crops and in all regions, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded
Currently three billion people live in the tropics and subtropics. They’ll nearly to double by the end of the century. How many more Filipinos will need food then?
The National Statistical Board asserts there are 94 million of us today. . No, sir, it’s 99.9 million, counter some US and international bodies.
The squabble stems from the flawed 2007 census. An “implosion” of voting age (18 years old) residents in Maguindanao for example, shoved growth rates to triple national levels. That skewed the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao demographic profile.
“There’ll be rude surprises in the 2010 census,” predict demographers at UP, Xavier, and San Carlos Universities. All agree there are five Filipinos today where there was one in 1940. We’ll breach the 100 million mark sooner rather than later.
The sea level has risen rapidly, Vital Signs points out. More than half (55%) of sea level rise “results from the melting of glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets”. This happened in tandem with pollution, acidification, and changes in seasonal water cycles.
Seventy percent of Filipinos cluster in coastal areas. Seaside resort owners are bewildered as sea water encroaches into front yards. Reclamation project calculations, in Lapu-Lapu City and elsewhere, now look shaky.
Fishermen are reeling from the impact. “Warming of sea water is associated with El Niño episodes. These caused coral bleaching on massive scales never seen before,” notes Ocean Heritage.
El Nido reef, for instance, once had 60-70% coral cover. El Nino, a decade ago, stripped that down to 5-10%. It has not recovered to date. Sea surface temperature in Bolinao, Pangasinan, ranged between 34.1 °C to 34.9 °C. That grilled giant clams.
“Mercury and lead emissions, from coal-fired power plants, particularly in the inner seas of the Visayas” will ravage fisheries further. Unmet protein needs from depleted fishing grounds are dumped on stressed farms..
Formation of severe storms could double. Remember “Ondoy” last year and “Basyang” as this year’s storm cycle began? Warmer climates will bring changes to rainfall and resulting drought. “It’s best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain,” Mark Twain once joked.
But it’s not funny that the “most extreme summers of the last century could become routine towards the end of this century”, predicts the University of Seattle. What would be summer 2100 in the Philippines be like?
One thing is sure. Today’s glut of 41 million tons of rice, recklessly imported by the Arroyo administration, would not be possible. Rice exporters will find their capacity sapped.
Filipino policy makers must move beyond politics-as-usual concerns. Executive and legislative agendas need to face up to gut issues. Water shortages, soil erosion, adaptation to, or mitigation of, weather change matter more than coddling Supreme Court justices by unqualified towns itching to be cities.
There are biological limits to what can be done. . "We can't just move all our crops north or south because a lot of crops are photosensitive.” notes Dr Geoff Hawtin at International Centre for Tropical Agriculture. “Flowering is triggered by day length”.
Will Russia and Canada, with their colder weather regimes, turn out to be the world's bread baskets tomorrow? Would the poor of Asia and Africa be able to pay for imports?
“The race is on to breed maize which can tolerate the heat of future summers”, says James Morgan, BBC’s science reporter. Countries are urged to maintaining maximum level of genetic diversity. Seed banks is a good insurance policy, providing options for developing future strains.
There is a potential for heat tolerance in”beans, legumes, sorghum, millet --- anything which grows in an environment subject to drought.”
Adapt or starve is the ultimate option that an altered tropical belt could offer. "You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it," said Seattle’s Professor Battisti. "You could also mitigate it and not let it happen in the first place.
"We are not doing enough… We don't know where the tipping points are,” Hatwin adds, “They could come quite quickly."
(Email: juanlmercado@gmail.com )
JUAN L. MERCADO started his journalistic career as a reporter for one of the community papers in Cebu. He then joined the staff of Evening News, serving first as a Senate reporter, then later as associate editor. Mercado was the first director of the Philippine Press Institute (1965-1972). He instituted PPI's first training programs as well as hands-on courses that helped facilitate coverage of sensitive beats like street demonstrations, the stock exchanges, the police and military.
He continued writing exposes on graft and corruption in government using the Philippine News Service as outlet, while still PPI director. Among the more notable stories he wrote were: the plight of sacada workers in Visayan sugar fields; customs corruption and widespread leakage of questions in a (nationwide) civil service examination for professionals.
He joined the Press Foundation of Asia as its Joint Chief Executive and started (DEPTHnews), an experiment in developmental journalism. He worked as editorial director of the service.
Mercado also served as correspondent for the Financial Times of London; the Honolulu Star Bulletin as well as The Bulletin of Sydney in Australia.
He was among the 22 journalists detained in the first wave of arrests by the Philippine martial law regime. Upon his release, he became communication officer for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Bangkok, Thailand. Thereafter, he was posted in FAO Headquarters in Rome, Italy as Attaché d' Cabinet.
Juan L. Mercado graduated from the University of San Carlos, Cebu City. He also took special courses at the American Press Institute in Columbia University in 1964 and at Henry Kissinger's foreign policy seminar at Harvard University.
He was named Journalist of the Year by Manila Rotary Club and received an Outstanding Alumnus Award at the University of San Carlos in 1970.
Source: Press Club Golden Jubilarians (thesis prepared by students of Miriam College) with revisions by. J.L. Mercado
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
PHILIPPINE PRINT MEDIA IN LAS VEGAS ALIVE AND WELL OR A DISGUISE TITLE FOR A BLOG POST AFTER A BREAK
A good thing to note: The Philippine print media thrive well in Las Vegas, as they do in Toronto. Here are some of the newspapers one can pick up free in any of those myriad Filipino restaurants and grocery stores. (Chow King, Seafood City, and Jolibee on Maryland Parkway in Las Vegas City, Nevada).
Saw paisanos there, read Philippine events while eating favorite Philippine victual, and talked to some of them who would no longer want to go back. "Um, maybe for a visit, a brief vacation at some Philippine resorts. Nah, it's good in the States."
(Click on image to zoom in on text.)
The week of sweltering heat (108F is normal), reminded us of a modern Sodom and Gomorrah in a desert city that could well be man's idea of happiness bought with the almighty dollar. Sensitive to the suffering of the rest of the starving world? Do not go to Las Vegas.
But "heaven is the vision of fulfilled desire/ and hell the shadow of a soul on fire." You can get both in Las Vegas. City of lights and overbearing and profligate use of energy. Oil spills in Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico, and China notwithstanding.
This time around, we went to visit the new Westgate Planet Hollywood where we bought vacation time, to escape Disney in Florida and the Caribbean cruises now and then. What's new? A huge wall-to-all screen covering the picture window that doubles as a ridiculously gigantic television. The grandchildren loved it. But if I spent a week watching the idiot box, I really did not have to leave home, did I?
(Oh, they've got everything in the buidling: a resort-like pool and cabanas, spas, a mile-long maze of boutiques, restaurants, theatres, peepshows, strip joints, name-it-they've-got-it-you-need-not-burn-yourself-under-that-infernal-sun traversing the Las Vegas Strip.)
Beats curling with a book under a shadetree in the beaches of San Fabian, Boracay, Pagudpud, Bauang, Palawan, Bohol, all paradises in the Philippines?
I can sleep better at home. But for retired senior citizens, the gambling casino is where one finds the Filipino nonagenarian staring blankly at a slotmachine hoping to be jolted by the cacophonic charivari of a jackpot on these one-armed bandits. Beats trying to sleep when one just could not -- TV or boring book to boot. Hope springs eternal? Nah, beats waiting in a dark room to die.
Don't eat your heart out. Save your skin from the Vegas heat this time of the year. Russia's searing heat and forest conflagrations are killing Muscovites as I write.
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