Most explosive issue / Other explosive issues

The most explosive social issue in the Philippines today – alongside poverty – is a population that has gone berserk. Now 84 million, it’s spurting close to 100 million, a hulking monster with a hundred claws we may not be able to control – at all. At the lowest levels of the population, particularly in the countryside, parents still consider it a boon and a blessing to beget 8 to 10 children. At mid-levels, the middle class, the family narrows down to 3-5 children. The rich and very rich pull it down a little more, 3 or 2.

The latter two, however, comprise just about 25 per cent of this bloated citizenry.

For the first time, the demographic explosion has so scared top levels of the government, a family of two children is now on the drawing board.Can it work? Speaker Jose de Venecia announced on TV several nights ago it could if the government could nail down a series of "incentives and disincentives". Bonuses for example, scholarships for the very poor, allowances, advances, liberal loans, huge government subsidies, food and transport exemptions. Higher taxes for the wayward rich. Fiscal punishment.

And so on and so forth.

Whoa now! All this is a pipe dream. It won’t work at all. Already I hear noises emanating from the Church that this is virtually a family control program that goes against the grain of infallible Church doctrine. And this doctrine – not to be trifled with – is that only the "rhythm method" is moral and valid, fixed as Mount Everest is fixed, the Cliff of Dover, the spires of the Vatican, the circumference of the earth. Disobey and the fires of hell will consume the sinner.

So how do we get out of this fix? Damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I strongly suspect that the Church notwithstanding, the government will eventually be compelled to strangle a population growth of 2.4 per cent annually or be strangled. The octopus must be slain. I know the following are grim scenarios: starvation, famine, mass migration by the millions, social turbulence, the maelstrom. If our population is not held back, and lashed to the mast we will all go haywire.

No economic system can be managed unless it manages the population.

Even if she does not mention it, this is the biggest problem of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. Unless we improve per capita income with blinding speed, unless we slow down population growth with equally radical speed, our destination is no other than Dante’s Inferno. We will be a "failed state" like Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka. We will be a nation lost to penury and obscurity because we produced babies with wild, ecstatic abandon while producing food at the pace of a tortoise afflicted with locomotor ataxia.

Quite apart from the population issue, my brief with GMA’s State of the Nation Address (SONA) is that it was silent on, or did not reveal, a "delivery sysem" that would implement her 10-point agenda for the nation.

What delivery system indeed? The same laggard, bogus free enterprise system with a democratic façade ruled by the very rich and propped by the very poor? Our elections are nothing else but a spoils system where the wealth is allocated to members of the Establishment (politicians, favored bureaucrats, old rich and new rich) and a few crumbs are scattered for the majority poor, a little bit more for the middle class.

Surely, the president does not think (or if she does, she’s tetched in the haid), the present system can deliver on her program. It can’t and she knows it. That townhall gathering in Paranaque was a grotesque joke.

We cannot refer to the political and economic systems of the United States and Europe as models. It took them 200-250 years to develop. They had the benefit of the Industrial Revolution, a slow population growth, the Reformation, the Renaissance, where close to a common culture produced the benefits of mass education, a driving full-fisted work ethic, a highly advanced education where "research and development" led to a clutch of industrial inventions and consequently unprecedented economic progress and prosperity

And so middle classes burgeoned everywhere as to mitigate the abuses of the rich and powerful. And so democracy and the freedoms were born.

Asia could not duplicate that. It had to look for a short cut. This is the story of Asia’s economic dragons which got out of despond in 30 years.

The Philippines must have long learned it cannot go the way of the US and Europe. There are some blinkered souls who still do, foremost among them Speaker Jose de Venecia. Day in and day out, he trumpets the parliamentray form of government, Europe naturally and with a long list of Asian countries including – God forbid! – China, Singapore, Pakistan. Joe de V, my friend, these Asian countries you claim enjoy the parliamentary system are mostly one-party, no election dictatorships. China never had any national elections. And it is close to being the world’s economic superpower.

We always looked West for economic models. We hardly ever looked East.

And East is where the economic world booms, arteries throb at high octane, markets flourish, and wealth is created faster than it is being created in the West. Trade among Asian countries is bigger than it is elsewhere, regionally. In twenty years, the bulk of the world’s middle class – the wealthiest human beings – will be located in Asia. India, with a billion population, is coming up. Bangalore is the technological jewel bringing up a once dirt-poor nation. India’s extreme poverty so shocked the patrician Jawaharlal Nehru when he finally stepped down from the opulent mansions of the Nehrus to mingle with his countrymen. Now he was the pandit (teacher) slogging the mudholes of Calcutta. And he wept.

The Philippines, of course, is the laggard and we must bow in shame.

Why can’t we do what South Korea did? In the words of Ezra Vogel: "South Korea was unrivalled, even by Japan, in the speed with which it went from having almost no industrial technology, to taking its place among the world’s industrial nations. No nation has come so far so quickly, from handicrafts to heavy industry, from poverty to prosperity from inexperienced leaders to modern planners, managers, and engineers.." And to think that in the early 50s, South Korea had been ruined by war, much of its population uprooted and wandering in the countryside!

Somewhere along the way, GMA will stumble, falter and fall if she sticks to the present system.

My neighbor Prof. Felipe Miranda is aghast. For many years, decades even, he had felt the nation’s pulse, charted its course But he never came up, as he said just days ago in his column, "with a significant increase in the people’s sense of hopelessness, their desire to migrate to another country and their willingness to consider radical alternatives – specifically the implementation of martial rule – to solve the many crises of the nation."

Finally, he did in two surveys just a year apart, between August 2003 and July 2004.

A year ago, he states, "significantly large majorities (60 to 70 per cent of those surveyed) disagreed with the idea of a hopeless Philippines, turned down migration as a personal option and rejected martial rule in coping with national problems." Now hopelessness has risen from 12 to 15 per cent, migration 22 to 25 per cent, and martial rule advocacy from 24 to 27 per cent.

Indeed these are significant, deeply disturbing increases! That about martial rule, more than a quarter of our population, is a brick wall coming down on my head! Let’s hear the professor some more:

"The sense of despair, the need to exit our country for good if one is to survive and do better and the willingness to resort to martial governance are most often associated with the best-educated, the materially better-off and the younger (indeed at the 18 to 24 years old) Filipinos. The rest of the nation, it must be noted, are not so markedly, different in temperament.’

Now to the nitty-gritty: "The SONA of 2003 failed to arrest and instead contributed to the sorry state the nation finds itself in. It is foolish to think that the SONA of 2004 could fare better unless the authorities somehow had managed to radically transform themselves and now would only work for the nation’s interest." (Revolution from above? Impossible!)

Mon Dieu, what the professor is saying is that we have already entered No Man’s Land. His figures stab at the pit of your stomach. In a year’s time, or two, if I understand him, and his figures make sense, the social volcano I have often predicted in this column can and will erupt.