The need to reverse urban migration

A country is nothing but its land and people and what the people do to the land. The Philippines is only slightly smaller than Japan and its present population is nearing the 80-million mark. About 70 percent of our people are clustered in congested conditions in urban centers and only 30 percent are distributed all over the countryside. Yet, our urban centers comprise only five percent of the total land area.

It is no surprise then that our countryside remains undeveloped with only few people working on the land. Even then, the few in the countryside live in depressed conditions tilling land that does not belong to them. About 80 percent of these informal settlers live on government land while 20 percent are staying in private lands.

It is absolutely necessary for government to distribute this 80 percent public land to our informal settlers for them to own, work on to make productive.

Yet, to date, about 60 percent of our land remains unreachable. There are no roads, power, water and telecommunications. There are no government infrastructure and utilities in place. The three million jobless Filipino could not thus work on these lands to make productive.

Government must invest in these places by putting up all the necessary infrastructure, that is, roads, bridges, ports, airports, as well as utilities such as water, power and telecommunications. These are necessary investments that government must undertake for it to realize revenues in the form of increased taxes.

Instead, government treats these investments as expenses and merely relies on the current budget from taxes as the source of their financing. Naturally, the current budget is woefully inadequate to finance all the infrastructure and utilities needed now for the development and upliftment of the lives of our people.

There are two most important responsibilities of governance. One is the education and training of our people to make them productive and law-abiding citizens. The other is to provide them the jobs commensurate to their capabilities and skills. To be able to do both, government must prepare its lands in order to absorb the people who shall work on them.

The rural areas comprising undeveloped loans has been subject of so many government programs under several administrations since our independence in 1946. But it was only President Magsaysay who was visionary enough to see the need to create new settlements all over the country. Under his Narra Resettlement Project, he moved into these new countryside settlements our landless brothers and sisters as he realized that government land is a waste unless people are made to work on them.

Unfortunately, this auspicious program was not followed by succeeding administrations after Macapagal. Had this project of creating new settlements, especially in the coastal areas, been followed, we would have prevented the massive migration of informal settlers into the urban areas. Our people should have by now been provided with their own piece of land they could call their own and till for themselves. This was a very good program as it did not involve the taking of big tracts of private land so that they could be left free to be managed on a corporate set-up with the tillers of land as stockholders and the landowner as principal stockowner.

Dole and Del Monte are good cases in point. These foreign companies were able to transform idle and undeveloped land in the wilderness of Mindanao into beautiful and productive land under a corporate set-up because they had the know-how and capital to do so. The country should have duplicated this corporate farming in depressed areas all over the countryside by encouraging informal settlers to migrate to these places and to work on the land.

In these instances, government should have extended long-term low-interest loans facilities to our local companies on a supervised credit basis to finance these corporate set-up farming settlements. This way, the rural areas would have been developed already and so many job opportunities created not only by the corporate farms themselves but by the construction of the infrastructure and utilities needed to make these areas reachable, in the first place. We could have encouraged migration to these places and reverse the influx of informal settlers to the urban areas.

While this program of creating new settlements in the countryside was discontinued after the Macapagal administration, it is never too late for government authorities to continue its execution to see the current population congestions in the metropolitan areas.

This week, we had a fulfilling experience with government representatives (like the DENR Regional Director, NEDA executives of the Region and representatives of the Office of the President) before the Regional Development Council of Region III where we presented a major land development project for the RDC’s approval and endorsement to higher authorities. This time, we felt government was a real partner with the private sector in welcoming the idea of master-planning on a grand scale and from day one a vast tract of land that is designed to decongest the metropolis and develop the countryside.

We do hope that the province of Quezon and Region IV will themselves follow-suit by likewise favorably endorsing the project to the higher authorities as much of the land involved is located there. We cite the need for urgency of the RDC’s action and will appreciate its immediate endorsement as the Project has long been in the drawing board for the past eight years now.

Needless to state, the project is one concrete and tangible solution to our problem of excessive urban migration as it is intended to decongest the informal settlers of Metro Manila when fully implemented.

(You may write your comments/suggestion at 15/F Equitable Bank Tower Paseo de Roxas, Makati City or through e-mail at [email protected])

(Editor’s note: Atty: Roxas is writing a limited series of articles dealing with financial matters and other important business topics.)