Debunking the Myths of over Population
According to the Lagman Report, there are 58 million of Filipinos who dwell below the poverty line. There exists a very malignant social malaise and to be able to prescribe the right remedies, its symptoms should be properly diagnosed, otherwise, more adverse consequences shall take place.
The question we would like to raise is "Why do we encounter economic difficulties?" Or simply expressed, why are we poor? The Philippines is said to be one of the countries in the world richly endowed with natural resources.
Let us look at these figures.
Causes of economic difficulties leading to mass poverty and hunger
1. Foreign debts servicing
More than 60 % of our budget goes to payment of foreign debt which has already increased to $34 billion. This huge foreign payment has resulted in budgetary deficits amounting to $613 million. The Lagman Report shows that most of these loans were incurred by the late Pres... Marcos during his despotic rule; 417 private corporations pass on their P417 billion loans to tax payers; 94 corporations left to Central Bank their P300-billion private corporate debts.
What is repugnant about foreign debts is that the bulk of revenues collected are being used to pay off debts and only a tackle goes to basic services such as health, food and nutrition. Moreover, we are forced to yield to unequal terms and conditions of the World Bank and the IMF in order to get fresh loans, a large chunk of which goes back to debt-vicing.
In 1992, the Philippines paid P113 billion foreign debt which consisted of 62% of revenues collected from taxes, fees, and earnings from Treasury Bills. The total collection was P180 billion, P6.96 billion lower than the agreement with the IMF. This agreement was made in return for fresh loans. Since September, 1992, P86.1 billion went to foreign debt servicing. The huge payment resulted to budgetary deficit. Lawmakers fault the government for surrendering to IMF/World Bank control. Documents obtained from the Department of Budget and Management show that most of the government expenses went to loan payments instead of productive programs. PD 1177 automatically sets aside funds for loan payments.
2. Unequal distribution of land and other resources
Only 20 % of our population own and control, legally or fraudulently 80% of agricultural lands. In Negros, 95% of sugarlands are owned by only 3% of the population; in Mindanao, the prime lands are owned by close to 130 corporations, 52 of which are multinationals who own 1/3 of the total land area of the island.
3. Undercultivation of agricultural lands
Of the 30 million hectares total land area of the country only about 13 million hectares are actually cultivated. If these lands are cultivated they could supply the food requirements of 82 million Filipinos and if modem farming technologies are applied and the production per hectare is increased, these lands can support even 122 million Filipinos. Of the 7, 100 islands, only 730 are inhabited.
4. Smuggling, graft and corruption, pilferage
Revenue losses reach P88 billion yearly by tax evasion, smuggling and non-payment of taxes on illegal exportation. P5 billion is lost to illegal loggers; pi billion is lost to electricity pilferage. Among these pilfers are huge manufacturing firms belonging to the top 1000 corporations. 45 super rich families in Forbes Park, a professional basketball player, an actress, a senator, a foreign embassy. MERALCO collects from all of us this loss in terms of "systems losses.
5. Import liberalization, deregulation of prices of commodities and trade monopolies.
Philippine government trade policies are geared towards the protection of traditional and big names in the business sector. The existence of powerful cartels which manipulate prices of commodities, create artificial shortage of goods like the Big Ten Rice Cartel and the Binondo Central Bank attests to this fact.
E.O. No. 8 lifts all qualitative and quantitative restrictions on around 3,000 imported items. Its implementation has led to billion peso losses for over 6 million rice and corn planters and 60,000 workers in the P64 million rice and corn industry. Aside from rice and corn farmers, those who are affected are copra, banana, cassava meal producers, molasses and fish meal producers
While most ASEAN countries provide incentives just to attract private sector investment, most Philippine government policies are geared towards protection of monopolies that hampers competitiveness. Examples of local industries affected by the monopoly are food-processing and fruit exportation. Food processing buys so much from agriculture where over 60% of the population and 2/3 of those below the poverty line are based. Growth in food exports will mean growth in agriculture, more jobs and higher income in the countryside's.
When an economic system is capital intensive, the tendency is to protect monopolies resulting in the demise of competitors in the market. Moreover, when the ruling elite who also controls the country's riches invest their profits and incomes in foreign banks, they divest the country of much needed resources for local job creating industries.
6. Misappropriation of funds at the expense of basic social services
6.1 Family Planning: P5.3 billion are earmarked for the purchase of contraceptives, condoms, pill, sterilization and abortion gadgets. This amount could be used to fund delivery of basic social services such as socialized housing, environmental protection, creation of job opportunities and delivery of health services.
6.2 Only.04% of the national budget is allotted to housing when in fact 680,000 units are neededpar annually.
6.3 Military spending 6.4 Debt-servicing
Causes of environmental ruin
It is a well-known fact that the world's pollutants are products of industrialized countries, for instance, toxic wastes, acid rain, etc. Hence, it cannot be said that it is population growth that is solely responsible for pollution of the environment. The following data point to the fact that it is multinational corporations whose plants and factories situated on Philippine soil that greatly cause environmental ruin.
The Non-Aligned Movement of Nations like Cuba and Libya lashed at Western nations for foreign interference that starts with human rights and environmental issues. It insisted that nations have the right to use their resources. They urged developed countries not to use environmental concerns as an excuse for interference in the internal affairs of developing countries nor should they be used to introduce conditionalities in aid.
Let us examine these facts:
1. Toxic wastes disgorged by huge factories
Millions of tons of poisonous lead and mercury mostly from oil refineries and chemical factories are excreted daily causing considerable ruin on marine life. Of the 400 rivers in the country, 80 are heavily polluted and 40 are virtually dead due to poisoning. Industrialization is the culprit.par par
2. Too much use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides
Twenty-two provinces suffer soil degradation due to massive use of fertilizers. Among these are Ilocos Sur, La Union, Misamis, Cotabato, Bukidnon.
3. Logging, legal and illegal, mining operations and quarrying
There are 480 logging concessionaires majority of them foreigners who have raked in $2 billion profit in the last 30 years. Trillion metric tons of silt have already accumulated in the river beds of Pangasinan due to mining operations in the Cordilleras. The floods that hit Ormoc and Nueva Ecija sometime ago which claimed more than 4,000 lives can be traced to illegal logging.
4. Commercial fishing and poaching:
Annually foreign poachers haul 620,000 metric tons of fish from Philippine waters without paying the government anything.
5. Farm conversion:
Farms have become smaller because they have been used for other purposes other than farming giving rise to landlessness and food shortage.
6. Consumerism:
People especially the rich consume more than what they need.
7. Export cropping or high value farming:
Priority crops are cutflowers, asparagus, rubber (the ELB Products of London is putting up a huge condoms factory at EPZA Bataan and it will utilize local raw materials), corn, cassava, fruits, and other export crops. Fish was abundant and cheap until the Japanese, American, and Europeans discovered them. Today, the poor man's galunggong pegs a price of P40- 50 per kilo.
Senator Wigberto Tañada makes a projection that . . . "by the year 2000, our population is estimated to reach 75 million. That is a potentially lame domestic market that can sustain the expansion of domestic industries especially wane goods or consumption industries. However. rampant land conversion that is happening due to the sleepy implementation of the agrarian reform program is disempowering majority of our people. The economic liberalization program. All in the name of global competitiveness could very well sink our local industries." Even Professor Renato Constantino protests, "selling to an abstract global market is given emphasis than selling to a population of 65 million people."
What are the motives of population control?
The American bases have been dismantled but imperialism is very much around and it comes in the form of contraceptive imperialism which most Filipinos barely notice. This is explicit in the National Security Study Memorandum 200 - a US intelligence declassified document which reveals US and UN motives in limiting the population of the Philippines and many other countries in Latin America, Southeast Asia, in the Pacific and Caribbean. The document dealt specifically on the relationship between increasing less developed country populations and future US access to resources and favorable trade policies ... and the possibility of accelerated ... anti-imperialist movements as a consequence of larger number of persons in Door nations. The control of foreign populations becomes a matter of US industrial and military security.
Overpopulation is a concoction of contraceptive pushers and abortion pushers who have banded together in a conglomerate called International Planned Parenthood (the FPOP, the secretariat of the DOH, is an affiliate). And who are these people? Owners of multinational corporations which manufacture infant formulas, contraceptives, condoms, IUD, sterilization and abortion gadgets like suction machines. They are the same people who control international money lending institutions like the World Bank, IMF, USAID, the Frankfurt-based Development Loan Corporation and the Japan-based Asian Development Bank.
What spirit prevails in the population control movement?
The basic philosophy of the population control movement is "less children from the unfit, more from the fit". This must sound familiar because Hitler applied this to thousands of Jews whom he considered an inferior human race. Margaret Sanger, the founder of International Planned Parenthood and who coined the term "birth control" lived to perpetuate this racist philosophy by designing a plan to eliminate the blacks, Eastern Europeans, Latin
Americans and now, Asians, - "human weeds" - from the human race. Living a life of promiscuity and perversion, she started the pornography business by sending pornographic literature to "customers" through the mail so that at one point in her life, she was convicted for spreading lewd materials. It must be a cause for alarm that the Margaret Sanger Center based in New York is the Executing Agency of the Philippine Family Planning Program. It sends funds and representatives to see to it that contraception and sterilization programs leading to menstrual regulation - a nice name for abortion - are fully implemented.
The modus operandi of contraceptive pushers is simple yet far-reaching: alter permanently the cultural climate because cultural changes bring about attitude and behavioral changes. Contraceptives manufacturers want everybody to develop a contraceptive mentality. They scare people of the "population bomb" - that time is near when Mother Earth can no longer accommodate more people than there are now. They impose upon couples not to bear children. They do this through a process called mental manipulation. And their accomplice is mass media. Messages encouraging population control are conveyed in advertisements, TV programs, movies and newspaper articles. Primarily, they preach that pregnancy is a disease which must be prevented by contraceptives. But, while they advocate population control, conversely, they want everybody to behave like animals who cannot resist responding to their libidinal instinct. This is the desired behaviour. To assure people that this is normal behaviour and that they need not worry about morals, contraceptive pushers present a plethora of available explanation for such behaviour, from philosophical to scientific. The most popular is Freud's theory that man is a sexual being whose behaviour is motivated by sexual gratification. Planned obsolescence and desensitization are the tools that they most frequently use. Through mass media, they make people believe that in this "modem" era, marriage is a thing of the past, chastity is passe, fidelity in marriage is now in the realm of oblivion, and Church teachings on these matters are also obsolete. Claiming extra and pre-marital sex are no longer taboo (they are already acceptable forms of behaviour) contraceptive pushers assure teenagers and philandering spouses that they may have extra and pre-marital affairs provided these sexual encounters do not result in pregnancies. To prevent pregnancy, contraceptive pushers advise couples to take their pick from a smorgasbord of contraceptives: condoms for men and women, pills, IUDs, tubal ligation, vasectomy and if these fail - ABORTION. It has been proven by the experiences of countries which promoted contraceptive use - whichever method - that this encourages abortion. In Thailand, for instance, as well as in Italy, the US, England, Sweden and other European countries where people have accepted contraception and abortion as "normal" and ordinary activities, abortion cases, teenage pregnancies and incidence of HIV infection leading to AIDS have risen remarkably. Despite the massive campaign for condom use, AIDS infection rate in our country is 9 times higher than last year's; in Thailand HIV infection continues to spread among young men. This is the conclusion of a study that analyzed the cases of over 2,000 men whose age ranged from 9 to 23. The men used condoms at an average of 61% of the time. In a Florida study of married couples, one partner in each couple being HIV-positive, 30% passed on the infection to their spouses, despite conscientious use of condoms. A Newsweek poll concluded that a teen who has "safe sex" (using condom) with an HIV-infected partner runs at least 30% risk of becoming infected. Similarly, abortion cases occur 4,000 times per day in the US and in the Philippines, there are more or less 100,000 abortions per year.
Contraceptive pushers find the family as a deterrent to the realization of their goal. Hence, they launch a massive attack against the family. First, they dislodge the father as a necessary member of the family by making him an irresponsible drinker, a womanizer who has no capacity to control his sexual appetite, a virulent wife beater who lays his hands on his wife and children at the slightest provocation. Their cohorts in mass media encourage him to behave like that. The movies, the beer and wine advertisements, sports programs and television programs present male models who typify the violent man and father.
Next, they corrupt the wife or mother by making her abhor pregnancy and childbirth (as if pregnancy were a dreaded disease). The government, through the DOH propagates the contraceptive mentality among them. They force mothers to take pills, to insert IUD in her uterus, to cut off the font of life, then they make her close her eyes while they abort her baby. They scare her to her wit's end: "Life is hard. The economy is going downhill. Prices of commodities are going up. It is expensive to bear and bring up children. Your husband is a drunkard and a womanizer. Nobody is going to help you."
Thirdly, they change the values of children through formal education and mass media. Kinder and elementary school pupils are taught the "merits" of small families through lessons in ecology. When they reach high school, they are taught birth control methods. What is alarming is that children are misinformed. They are not told the adverse effects of contraceptives. DECS Bulletin (No.2, series of 1987) dated April 28, 1987, entitled "Information on AIDS" and sent to all school officials in both private and public schools states: "The risk of sexual transmission of HIV is likely to be reduced by the use of condoms. Young people, early in their sexually active lives and thus likely to have been infected with HIV, have the most gain from condom use. . . . The effectiveness of condoms in preventing infection is not proved, but their consistent use may reduce the risk of transmission." Does it not condone promiscuity? Obviously, there is no 100% guarantee. Then, why prescribe its use? The DECS has reduced itself to marketing agent of condoms manufacturers and they have their share of the $310 million dollar fund for population control program which has condoms promotion as one of its components. With weakened moral fiber and with the abundance of contraceptive pills and condoms, teenagers experiment on having sexual relationships. One school directress in a private school is shocked to learn that Grade Six pupils in her school carry on intimate boy-girl relationships.
Finally, population control advocates have prostituted the meaning of marriage: they have repudiated the most sacred aspect of it - procreation. They encourage couples to relish only that which is pleasurable but to avoid the responsibility that entails this pleasure. They have reduced sex to the level of hunger and thirst. Never mind having babies. There are plenty of contraceptives and abortion clinics around. Have fun with sex. These are the messages couples are forced to absorb. What has happened? Marriage is rendered obsolete (and so are Church teachings). Hundreds or thousands of couples live without the benefit of the clergy. They engender another social malaise: unwanted children, battered women and children whose emotional and spiritual wounds take time to heal, sometimes almost a lifetime.
Moral decadence
Preponderant choice of alternative lifestyles such as temporary live-in relationships, pre marital and extra marital affairs, teenage pregnancies, abandoned children, proliferation of pornography, rampant violence and crimes, rape, high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases and now AIDS. All these are elements and benchmarks of a contraceptive-prone society.
Economic difficulties
The massive family planning program eats up considerable portion of the budget which can be realigned to finance delivery of basic services to the less fortunate members of society. But instead of food, the government insist on giving pills, condoms, IUD, etc.
Countries like Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, and many countries in Europe suffer acute manpower shortage and have to rely on migrant workers, a situation which drains their economy.
Disempowerment of women
Women who are contracepting seldom manage to say NO to sex with their spouses even if they are not inclined to it at the moment. They become slaves of their pleasure and convenience-seeking instinct. Hence, abortion cases are estimated to have reached 750,000 cases per year. They fail to realize that abortion is the extension of failed contraception.
Disempowerment of couples
Couples are left with no choice but to limit the number of their children to the number set by the agencies of the United Nations such as UNFPA, UNDP, WHO, UNICEF, UNCED and the USAID.
For more information, go to the following websites
Simbahayan Commission (Family Life Ministries) www.simbahayan.org
Kanlungan ng Buhaykanlungan@altavista.com
Human Life International www.hli.org
or e-mail austinruse@c-fam.org
