BENCHWARMER

Frozen dawn
RAMON DACAWI

In what may be called the State of the Cordillera Address, regional economic development authority Juan Ngalob last Monday said this mountain region saw the cracking of dawn 20 years ago this month. The idiom is apt. The creation of an administrative region in 1987 indeed promised a new day for this upland which, despite its water, forest and mineral wealth, remains at par with the country’s poorest and least developed.

It was a crucial move towards closing the wide divide drawn by national planners who had dismembered us by assigning three of our provinces to Region 2 and the rest, including Baguio, to Region 1. Regionalization was supposed to be a big leap towards fleshing out self- rule or autonomy. We had clamored for self-rule for long and then there it was, on a silver platter, enshrined, hallowed, consecrated by the highest law of the land forged that year.

The push for autonomy, however, just cracked up in two plebiscites. As noted by Manong Juan, only Ifugao voted for self-rule in 1991 but the Supreme Court ruled a one-province autonomous region can’t hold water. Ifugao rejected it in 1998, when Apayao saw wisdom in the organic act or charter. So 20 years after the cracking of dawn, it appears to be still cracking. It appears we’re still seeing the crack of dawn, as if that moment of hope remain frozen in time, as in a photograph.

To cynics, the picture appears more of a sunset. Twenty years after, there’s nothing much to celebrate, except that we are no longer satellites of other regions. We no longer have to beg the blessings of the Ilocos and Cagayan for positions, budgetary allotments, approval and implementation of our own development plans.

Manong Juan calls the period following the second rejection of autonomy as one of discernment. Still, as he pointed out, nine years of discernment has been too long for it to dawn on us that it’s time to “move on to a time of action”. After 20 years of an administrative set-up, we can hardly move, much less move on. Or else we no longer want to move, content with what we have, regional positions and all, except the budget we deserve.

So there were advances under the present set-up, as Manong Juan admitted in his address during the regular flag ceremony at the city hall grounds. On the birth of this region, he said, our economy was growing at about eight percent, better than the national average of seven percent. He juxtaposed, however: “At that time, too, we were speaking of a poverty incidence of 51 percent which was higher than the national average of around 50 percent”. From 1987 to 2006, he said, our economic growth averaged five percent, again higher than the national average of four percent.

“Our growth, however, has been erratic – from a negative growth in 1992 and 2001 to a record high of 17 percent in 1999,” he pointed out. Thing is, while the yardstick used for poverty is standard for all regions, that for growth is not. Our growth in some years might have been by leaps and bounds compared to the rest of the nation, but our advances can not actually approximate theirs.

We have different starting lines. They had long hurdled heights we are only starting to try to scale. Many regions led by the National Capital, whose development Cordillera resources helped propel, are competing in the majors. We are still in the bush league. This reality applies to the lingering disparity in the sharing of our national resources or wealth, from each region to each region that Manong Juan correctly touched on.

“Our analysis of national government spending from 1987 to 2004 indicates that CAR (the Cordillera Administrative Region) is not being accorded an equitable share,” he stressed. While our budgetary allocations for the line agencies have steadily increased over the years, he noted these have been shrinking compared to other more developed regions. “Despite CAR’s higher poverty incidence rate between 2000 and 2003, the national government spent more in the more affluent regions of CALABARZON and Central Luzon, our neighboring regions of Ilocos and Cagayan Valley,” he said.

From its end, CAR was contributing two percent to the national output during its initial years and then raising it to 2.2 percent last year. In the 2006 National Expenditures Program, however, CAR was deemed least priority, while Cagayan Valley, ARMM and CARAGA, which contribute less, got bigger allocations. The discrepancy in resource allocation also has something to do with national standards.

We get less internal revenue allotment because the size of the slice is dependent on population and area. We have less roads because standards are based on flat, lowland conditions that require less expense than having to cut through mountainsides that erode time and again. We have less schools because our communities are scattered due to the rugged terrain, making it difficult to harness the minimum number of children required by national standards for a classroom to be built.

Long before the establishment of the CAR, we were a major backbone of the national economy through the extraction of our gold and other minerals and the and the tapping of our watersheds to irrigate the lowland farms, light up the urban centers and run their industries.
Time and again, we wanted to explain the need for a shift in standards. While we can’t muster the population and the area required for a bigger IRA share, national policy should give weight to the volume of Cordillera gold and water it contributed and continues to give in the name of national development.

We can even explain that the Cordillera actually pioneered the build-operate-transfer scheme of development, even if our definition is hardly mainstream. They built up here the dams and the mines, operated them, but transferred the electric power and gold to Metro Manila. We were not also far behind in contributing to the “bibingka” or downward-upward synergy for national development that then President Ramos espoused.

As then Benguet Gov. Raul Molintas noted, the province and the Cordillera had long cooked its bottom end of the native cake Last Monday afternoon, a new dawn cracked for the Cordillera. In her State of the Nation Address, President Arroyo saw fit to ask Congress to enact a law that would allow direct payment of national wealth taxes due the local government units in the Cordillera and the rest of the country.

During his term, Molintas noted in a forum on “responsible mining” that the national government had yet to remit Benguet’s national wealth share of some P120 million from the operation of a mine in the province. As our Cordillera solons take the cue, it would do well for us to take another look at the regional autonomy we rejected twice.

It would allow us to discern (to borrow Manong Juan’s term) its promise for empowerment and development through the equitable sharing of the benefits being realized from what remains of the natural wealth of these uplands. Instead of arguing again, we can review the organic act and remove the contentious provisions that divided us. We may even end up with only one provision: “There is hereby created an autonomous region in the Cordillera”.

From that beginning, we can later add other provisions that will empower us. Otherwise, we might end up with the same lament, the same issues of poverty and inequity on Cordillera Day 20 years from now. (e-mail: rdacawi@yahoo.com)