Sunday, June 23, 2013

Reality bites: Artificial growth equals no jobs

GOTCHA 
By Jarius Bondoc 
The Philippine Star 
Economic-growth“Capitulation” is what it is. As President Noynoy Aquino swore on Independence Day never to bow down to any challenge to Philippine territory, one subaltern was giving in to the habitual challenger — China.
Immigration chief Ricardo David was reported to be soliciting the liberty of 12 Chinese poachers arrested last April. It’s a queer move by an ex-armed forces head. The Palawan provincial prosecutor already has indicted the 12 for illegally holding endangered species in their ship that ran aground in the country’s internal Tubbataha Reefs. The Bureau of Immigration and the National Prosecutorial Service are both under the Department of Justice.
In a memo, David told Prosecutor Allen Ross Rodriguez to turn over the 12 to him for deportation. Deportation would mean freeing the wildlife thieves from Philippine justice — which is exactly what the Chinese embassy in Manila has been lobbying for.
For possessing some 400 slaughtered Palawan anteaters, forbidden under Philippine and international laws, the Chinese face up to 20 years in prison. Aside from illicit wildlife trade, they also are charged with unlawful entry into the Philippines, another 12-year term. For crushing 4,000 square meters of 500-year-old corals in the Tubbataha marine park, they must pay P96-million fine. That 97,000-hectare zone of the Sulu Sea between Palawan, the Visayas, and Mindanao, is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Having been arraigned, the 12 can post bail. Palawan environment lawyers are petitioning the court for a hold-departure order, to keep them in country. Still, the Chinese embassy can whisk them out, like it did an indicted kidnapper and at least two narco-traffickers last decade.
Under a baseless nine-dash map, China is claiming ownership of the entire South China (West Philippine) Sea. It has grabbed Mischief Reef and Scarborough Shoal, and is circling Ayungin Shoal and oil-rich Recto Bank. All are within the Philippines’ 200-mile exclusive economic zone, but 700 miles from China.
Chinese poachers also trespass Tubbataha 1,000 miles away, to sate their homeland’s appetite for edible exotic animals. Though ill-equipped, marine rangers interdict four to six poaching launches a year, laden with endangered giant clams, sea turtles, squid, octopus, sharks, dolphins, and napoleon wrasse.
During the Arroyo tenure, the foreign office and DOJ routinely yielded to Chinese embassy pressures to drop charges against marine rustlers. Most of recent years’ arrestees are recidivists. One time Palaweños had to stage a die-in at the airport runway to stop the flight of detained poachers to Manila en route to Hainan.
Poacher abettors in Manila are still at it today.
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It should be obvious by now to government economic managers: the country’s supposedly spectacular 6.6-percent GDP growth in 2012 and 7.8 in first quarter-2013 were artificial.
Those were fueled mostly by hot money. Foreign managers only temporarily parked multibillion-dollar funds in the Philippines due to slumps in their US and European home markets.
Those were not long-term investments in manufacturing or agribusiness. By nature of money markets, the placements didn’t create jobs.
That is why joblessness today — 7.5 percent, is at its worst in three years. So is underemployment, at 20 percent.
All those successive upgrades of the Philippines by foreign economic raters meant nothing to workingmen. The upgrades were for the guidance of the foreign fund managers. In fact they have been departing this week back to the west after the US announced certain financial reforms. The peso has slumped, meaning, prices of imported commodities, especially oil, will rise.
In real terms the unemployed number 3.5 million — about 600,000 of whom are last March’s new college graduates, and the same number in farm and fishing communities ravaged by typhoons and floods. Another eight million are only plodding in part-time jobs.
The solution is two-step. First, the economic managers should stop jumping for joy like chimpanzees at the artificial figures. Only then can they start implementing the obvious solution: engage the people in agriculture-fisheries and disaster preparedness.
If the government spends in flood control, constructing evacuation shelters, and relocating threatened communities, hundreds of thousands can be employed. So will encouraging private businesses to go into fabrication and trade of farm and fishing implements, from simple hand tractors to large threshers and sea craft.
Those proposals are not new. Economists have been advising them for decades. Just that, politicians and bureaucrats refuse to listen. How many electoral candidates, national and local, in 2010 and 2013, promised jobs to the voters — then became busy with pork barrels kickbacks when they won?
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E-mail: jariusbondoc@gmail.com

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