UN sets $107-M plan for RP

Saying the incidence of poverty in the Philippines remains higher than in any other country in Southeast Asia, the United Nations has launched a five-point development program for the country worth $107.7 million.

The program, called the United Nations Development Assistance Framework in the Philippines (UNDAF), will run from 2005 to 2009.

"UNDAF is the United Nations’ covenant with the government and the people of the Philippines," UN resident coordinator Deborah Landey said in the program profile.

She noted that the UNDAF stemmed from the Common Country Assessment, which analyzed the development problems of the Philippines.

Landey said the UNDAF has identified five key areas in which the UN "believes it can contribute" — macroeconomic stability, broad-based and equitable development, basic social services, good governance and environmental stability, and conflict prevention and peace-building.

The UN said the national per capita poverty threshold — the amount of money a person needs to earn to meet his nutritional requirements and other basic needs — stands at P11,605. This means that about 34 percent of Filipino families are impoverished — a percentage that is "even higher than during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis," the agency said.

The UN pointed out that had the Philippines’ fertility rate been kept at the same rate as Thailand’s 1.8 percent, its per capita gross domestic product — the value of all goods and services produced domestically divided by the population of a country — would have been "50 percent higher than it now stands." The GDP is one of the indicators of the growth of a country’s economy.

The five priority areas of the UNDAF are "interlinked and mutually affects one another, yet are being exacerbated by the wide disparities existing in the country with regards to ownership, access and participation and decision-making power," the UN said.

The UN noted there are many underlying factors that hamper the development of the Philippines.

Access to basic social services such as health and education must be widened, according to the UN, which cited that social services expenditures as a share of GDP fell from 5.46 percent in 1997 to 4.25 percent in 2003.

The agency took note of the Philippine government’s "weak fiscal management" since the outstanding national debt, at P4.1 trillion, more than doubled from 1997 to 2003.

The UN also cited the "pervasive" graft and corruption and the "intense" partisan politics and political disruptions as factors that hamper the country’s growth.

"Out of the total national budget of P781 billion in 2001, P100 billion or 13 percent was at risk of being lost to corruption," the agency said.

The UN observed the Philippines "continues to be highly vulnerable to environmental damage that threatens the nation as well as the planet, given that two-thirds of the poor remain dependent on natural resources for income and sustenance."

The agency said sustainable economic growth cannot be achieved at the cost of environmental degradation.

"Such degradation represents a manifestation of deeper causes relative to weak institutions, conflicting and unequal access to ownership, poverty, population pressure, urbanization and insufficient training in good environmental management," the UN said.