All planning is population planning

We said, "Population is important." Actually, it's all important. And we have to add, all planning is nothing without including population anywhere in it. In fact, almost all the development indicators we can think of, or any of their variants, include population figures. Besides just being one of the foremost socioeconomic figures per se, it actually is the denominator of almost all others, across the different sectors of society and their subdescriptors. It comes in the form of  "per capita" or "per 1,000 population."

Let's start with infrastructure since this seems to be the more controversial and important nowadays. We look at road density — expressed either in kilometers per square kilometer (length/area) or kilometers per 1,000 population. To most people, the latter seems to be the better indicator, and for the most part, I agree. If 1,000 people in Iceland have 100 kilometers of roads while 1,000 of us have only 10, certainly that country is better developed than ours. Or try comparing Makati with a 6th-class municipality in Mindanao.

We go to the economic and social sides. Our total rice production should be enough to feed the total population, else, we import from outside. Let's put aside the other issues of corruption in the food sufficiency programs; just concentrate on production efficiency itself. To date, I still can't understand why we need to import rice from Thailand or Vietnam when their agricultural officials probably trained at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Los Baños. Fine, we import if we need to. But why are their prices cheaper — so much lower it supports a lucrative smuggling business fuelling further graft and corruption.

How many Filipinos are employed in the agricultural sector and how efficient are they? What's our daily intake of protein and what's our per capita consumption of fish as compared to our fish production (catch and bred). Are these increasing or decreasing? — figures what we can readily find answers, but the next (planning) question is, what are we doing about them? How many doctors do we have per 1,000 population? Or policemen or firemen, or even fire trucks? At the classroom level, how many students do we cram in each?

Educators know that you learn more if there are only 6 students per teacher rather than 60. Oh, I think that's common sense. Technically, if we have more midwives per 1,000 population, we will have lesser maternal mortality and neonatal mortality rates, and less stillbirths. If we go over all the development rates, ratios and indicators, in all our plans, almost all of them are related to the population in some way or the other. The more people we have, the more we need of everything. And we have not touched the issue of population itself increasing as we speak.

The difficulty in realizing the importance of population figures and their dynamics. By the time you finished reading this article, there's probably 25 more Filipinos in the world, since a bigger number of babies would have been born and lived, and some of our countrymen would have died at the same time. Those who died were probably from the older generation but not all — people of any age die (insurance agents have probability statistics on these which they use to compute your premiums). Male, female, young, old, senior citizens, infants, children, adolescents, school-age, young professionals, working-age, retirees, etcetera all the different categorizations actually grow in numbers, or decrease, at individually different rates. Talk about complex systems…

Look at this against the backdrop of the three development planning domains — socioeconomic, physical framework, and social-demographic. The last one influences the first two considerably. You have to plan infrastructure using population figures at a future time since, as we have always asserted before, big infra projects take 7 years to gestate, and that's if we're lucky, of which usually we're not! You have to plan education such that it fits the employment requirements at a future time. Failure to do so will result in an overabundance of some skills and a shortage of others later. And we have to plan the country considering that the percentage of people living in cities will be much higher 10 years from now, most of the new additions will probably be less productive and will need more government support since these are migrants from the rural areas. The housing problem will exacerbate, social services will be strained, and urban woes will become more acute.

And yet, many of us look at the country's problems from the perspective of where we "individually" are. Traffic congestion is bad and we whine because our cars can't speed off the way it was supposed to as advertised. We complain because stock market prices are not as high as we wanted them to be. We fret on less profit figures while the rest of the population simply tries "to live." Some "for another day." There's more to development than new buildings we see each day. (To be continued)