Microcosm

Saranggani province, at first glance, might appear to be the poster boy of our economic emergence.

The province is below the typhoon belt, with ample fertile land for agribusiness. Around the stunning bay are processing plants supporting the booming tuna industry. There are canning factories serving the aquatic farms that blossomed over the past few years.

The province is served by one of the country’s best airstrips, built with American support. Through that facility, fresh tuna is flown out for export every day.

General Santos City is, by every measure, a boomtown. Malls and hotels spring up like mushrooms. Excellent roads radiate out of the city, facilitating commerce with the surrounding areas.

Saranggani is well away from the conflict zone and largely unaffected by violent incidents common in nearby provinces. The province, however, stands to benefit the onset of peace in this troubled part of the country since this will likely spur economic activities even more.

The pretty picture of this bustling province astride a scenic bay is a deceptive one, however. Despite all the signs of bustling commerce around the port and along the highways, Saranggani remains one of the country’s poorest provinces.

The latest report tracking provincial poverty numbers of the National Statistics Coordination Board (NSCB) ranks Saranggani the eighth poorest province in the country. The province’s 45.6% poverty rate is exceeded only by Lanao del Sur’s 68.9%, Apayao’s 59.8%, Eastern Samar’s 59.4%, Maguindanao’s 57.8%, Zamboanga del Norte’s 50.3%, Davao Oriental’s 48% and Ifugao’s 47.5%.

Saranggani’s poverty figures cohere with the average poverty rate for the ARMM, the poorest cluster of provinces in the country. The official definition for poverty used by the NSCB as of 2012 is a threshold of P5,458 monthly income for a family of five to meet basic needs.

As in most of the poorest provinces, the poverty figure for Saranggani has been steadily worsening. In 2003, 36.7% of the province’s population fell under the poverty line. By 2009, the figure rose to 40.7%. This jumped to 46.5% just three years after.

In many ways, Saranggani province is a microcosm of the larger national economy.

The visible growth of enterprises and impressive construction activities, increased traffic on the road and in the ports, palpably higher consumer spending reflected in the expansion of malls did not bring down poverty. On the contrary, just beneath the patina of economic progress, poverty worsens for the poorest of the poor.

If poverty reduction is the goal, then the Conditional Cash Transfer Program, into which government poured billions in borrowed money, is a dramatic failure. The money might have been used more effectively in better-designed, more imaginative programs for social intervention.

As a participating country in the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, we committed to bringing down the poverty rate to half what it was when the global program was launched. What that means, for us, is to reduce by half the 33.2% poverty rate in 1991 to just 16.6%.

We are not going to meet our commitments to poverty reduction. We have been creating poverty instead of reducing it.

When the latest numbers for self-rated poverty were released, about half the population saw themselves poor. This happens even as we boasted the second highest GDP growth rate in this part of the world. Something is clearly amiss.

Confronted with the numbers, the Aquino administration convened a Cabinet meeting to discuss worsening poverty rates. The Cabinet cluster on human development and poverty reduction, according to the President’s spokesman, recommended “strategies with spatial and sectoral dimensions to ensure attainment of inclusive growth.”

But of course. Government ought to have understood this from the start. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to poverty incidence as the conditional cash transfer program would have us imagine. Poverty alleviation needs to address the particularities of localities where many are poor.

In a word, poverty cannot be attacked with a blunt instrument. As a consequence, local governments must play the lead role in understanding why poverty happens in their localities. They must design the programs of intervention themselves, adapted to the peculiarities of local economies.

The poverty numbers that contradict the superficial images of economic dynamism in this province shocked the local government of Saranggani as much as the overall numbers shocked our national leaders.

The provincial government is now taking a closer look at the poverty profile in the locality in order to map out a comprehensive strategy for intervention. From what little I know about this province, I suspect the communal divisions between the settler Christian population, the Muslim community and the indigenous tribes figure in the distribution and reproduction of poverty.

That is a working hypothesis. The provincial government is still figuring out why the poverty rate is so high in a locality that otherwise exhibits economic dynamism. Saranggani is hardly a stagnant local economy.

The local-level anti-poverty strategy Saranggani will adopt, based on a keener understanding of the peculiar social dynamics of the locality, might prove educational for the national government.

It is now fairly obvious that the macroeconomic numbers do not correlate with the alleviation of poverty among the excluded sections of the community. Tailor-fit local strategies will provide the key to actual poverty alleviation.

That adds a novel nuance to the old adage oft repeated by development workers: Think global; act local.

In Saranggani, many questions about the precise formula for inclusive growth might find answers.