Weak middle class, strong rebellion

How can one guess if a barrio is likely to succor communist rebels or Moro separatists? Simple: count the average income of its middle class. The lower it is, the more chance to be a rebel commune; the higher, the less risk.

This uncanny item came up in the 2005 Philippine Human Development Report, a biennial study of economic trends and policies commissioned by the United Nations.

Researching poverty in provinces torn by rebellion, economists noted that average incomes of all homes rich or poor in a locale do not accurately gauge its advance or decline. But average middle-class incomes do. Graphs show that "beginning with low incomes, the incidence of armed conflict first rises before falling as the average income of the middle class rises."

The reason is clear, says the Human Development Network that did the research: "Elements of the middle class – students, professionals – are typically the bearers of revolutionary ideology and also provide the bulk of the leadership." If a barrio is deprived of essentials like electricity or roads, and opportunities to rise thus are dim, the middle class is the first to feel the neglect and fight for equity.

The study thus focuses on measures that can lift the middle class and, consequently with it, the poor. These range from social justice such as land reform, to basic needs like water, to tools for advancement like education. Nine of every ten of the 76 provinces harbor either or both insurgents and separatists. If a locale presently has an 88-percent chance of armed conflict, full land redistribution reduces it to 84 percent. Water service further brings it down to 70 percent. But child schooling and adult literacy result in zero rebellion. Education truly is the great leveler.

HDN’s latest report takes off from its first study on human security in 1994. Human development is a process of widening the range of people’s choices. Human security deals with people exercising these choices safely and freely, that is, that they can be relatively confident that opportunities they have today are not gone tomorrow.

Nature and man can be a cause of a locale’s insecurity. Typhoons and droughts destroy crops; terrorist attacks of ports, ships and trains threaten travel and mobility. Forward planning can mitigate the effects of floods and El Niño, however, through drainage and irrigation. Good police work can stave off terror plots. Human security thus consists of freedom from want, from fear, even from humiliation.

The HDN identifies seven major fields of human security:

• Economic – assured basic income, usually from productive and remunerative work or, in the last resort, from publicly financed safety nets;

• Food – assured physical and economic access to basic food, closely correlating per capital food production, incomes and daily calorie supply;

• Health – needed by the poorest because linked to bad nutrition and unsafe surroundings, like polluted water;

• Environment – the need for healthy physical settings, safe from air or water pollution and deforestation, and protected ecosystems;

º Personal – security from physical violence like war, torture, rape, child labor or ethnic tension;

• Community – belonging in a group that provides cultural identity and reassuring set of values; and

• Political – assured human rights, unthreatened by state repression but guaranteed effective government.

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Reader Del Bohol enjoys the fearless exposés and expressions in The STAR, but writes about an oft-neglected concern: the welfare of jeepney riders – the bulk of the population. "Of jeepney drivers, I’m sure there are similar complaints," he enumerates, with my comments:

"1. Nine out of ten times that I hail a jeep, it doesn’t park well for me to get on." The rule is for drivers to pull over to a foot or less from the curb. Only recently a teenage girl wrote to another newspaper about the driver stopping right at a flooded corner, then yelling at her for being so finicky about where to get off. That driver must be ignorant of deadly leptospirosis infection from animal (rat, horse, dog, cat) urine in floodwaters.

"2. Before I’m able to sit, the driver speeds on." The driver is ignorant of the law of motion, that when he zooms forward, passengers are thrown backwards, and one who is not properly seated can fall off. One time a passenger flung his fare in coins at the driver and said, "That’s for not letting me get on my seat earlier."

"3. On my rides to work my uniform often stains from rust or grease on the back rest and railings." Jeepney operators must clean the vehicles before the pasada. That’s in their certificates of public convenience, says Len Bautista, chief of the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board.

"4. Most jeepneys are smoke-belchers. My brother recently had an attack of hypertension because of the noxious jeepney exhaust." The World Health Organization found that 85 percent of urban Philippine air pollution comes from vehicle emissions, mainly jeepney diesel smoke. It causes billions of wasted pesos in hospital and medical bills for respiratory ailments. Two out of five Filipinos who contract lung disease die of it.

"5. The driver smokes, and when I politely tell him not to, he just gives me a deadpan look or tells me to go ride another jeepney." Smoking is banned nationwide in all public vehicles.

 "6. And when they brake, it’s like they’re stomping on a cola can and are oblivious of the way passengers are jerked left and right, forward and back." One time while motoring in Manila I accosted a jeepney driver for zipping recklessly through traffic and endangering the lives of his passengers. You know what the passengers told me? "Mama, ang yabang mo naman makasita komo de-kotse ka." Maybe next time I’ll just bash him with my lead pipe to approximate being mayabang.

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