NO HOLDS BARRED

Ike Señeres
Global poverty and warming

MANILA -- International agencies are already warning that global warming will increase global poverty and this should also be taken as a warning to our national agencies to move double time on poverty reduction here in the Philippines . Add to that the effects of the global meltdown on local poverty, and that should be enough to push them to move triple time.

Despite the fact that Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are also victims of the global meltdown because many of them have lost their jobs abroad, they are still considered to be the saviors of our economy. It is a sad reality that we have to rely on the labor trade to sustain our economy, but that is the way it is now.

Since the trend of job losses abroad is already established, the government should now look for another sector that could continue to “save” our economy, if that is at all possible. There could be other sectors that could do this, but I personally see the potential of the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) sector, as it is now responsible for about 90% of the business being generated in this country.

In gratitude to the service that the OFW sector has done for our economy, why not help them to become SME owners as they return? I understand that the Overseas Workers Welfare Authority (OWWA) is already giving loans to OFWs who are taking this direction, but it takes more that just one government agency to make this happen.

Do you know that farmers still represent about 15% of our labor force? As a matter of fact, no other group comes close to farmers as a labor block in our national statistics. While the statistics may be right, it still counts farmers as “farm laborers” and I think this is where we have to make a fundamental move, to start treating farmers not as laborers but as entrepreneurs.

If only we could “upgrade” our farmers so that they could become new entrepreneurs instead of laborers, their numbers now representing 15% of the labor force could drastically swell the numbers of SME productivity way beyond the present 90% more or less.

I think that it is for the wrong reasons that we practically abandoned our agricultural economy to supposedly jump into the more “classy” and more “dignified” industrial economy. And now, it seems that we also want to set aside what remains of our industrial economy in order to jump into the more “glitzy” and more “fashionable” knowledge economy.

All reasons told, I think that what is more practical for our country is a healthy mix of the agricultural, industrial and knowledge economies, powered by an army of SMEs, each one with a globally competitive line of business, each one contributing aggressively to national productivity.

To be more specific, I think that we should build an agriculture based industrial economy that is also strengthened by the newer information and communications technologies. I understand the national fascination now for automating the elections, but more than that, we should really focus more on automating our farms and industries.

I also understand our fascination for the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry that is part of the knowledge economy, but we should now temper our fascination that BPO industries are really dependent or I should say over dependent on the success or failure of foreign clients that are now being battered by the global meltdown.

I am advocating an agriculture-based industrial economy, because that way we do not have to rely on imported raw materials to produce goods that may not be globally competitive in price, because of the high cost of these materials.

The bottom line in all of this is our capability to produce our own materials and the truth of the matter is agriculture and forestry or should I say agro-forestry is the only way that we could produce these materials. When I say agro-forestry, I do not just mean the rural areas, because urban agro-forestry is now a practical option. I am now organizing the SME Business Club for the purpose of helping everyone, including OFWs, and farmers among others, to become SMEs.

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