Danger on the Trail Ahead

Commentary

By Denis Murphy

I see a great danger looming for the victims of Supertyphoon “Yolanda” as they trudge toward recovery. I fear that the plan of the government and the United Nations to end all food relief in April is premature, and can cause many families to fall back into hunger rather than spur them forward to economic self-reliance.

Six months after a disaster, the United Nations and other relief bodies regularly end the distribution of food, believing that by that time the beneficiaries will have enough cash income to buy the food they need. After six months a dole economy gives way to a cash economy. Donors believe longer food relief will encourage dependency.

But the result of our own sampling of the families in Barangays 89 and 90 of Tacloban City shows that many would not yet have found sufficient income to purchase their food when the cutoff comes in April. We should note that cash-for-work programs will also stop in April, along with the restoration and repair of agriculture and aquatic resources.

We selected 30 families at random in Barangays 89 and 90 and asked them if right now they can pay cash for the food they eat, or if they depend to some degree on the food relief. All but five said they cannot yet pay for all the food they eat or need to eat. I don’t see a realistic hope that they can do so by April, especially if the UN program and other cash-for-work programs are suspended. The families all seek economic opportunities.

To be honest, I have talked about this matter with high UN officials, international donors, members of local nongovernment organizations, personal friends, and my wife, Alicia. Only my wife agrees with me because she has met the same people I have met.  She doesn’t always agree with me so readily, as our friends know. To  most of the other people I spoke with, I must have sounded like the hen in the children’s story “Henny Penny,” who went around frantically warning everyone that the sky was falling because an acorn had fallen on her head.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the typhoon survivors do not have enough income to take over the cost of food. Most of them lost the very means of work. Fishers lost their boats, motors and nets. Rice farmers lost their fields to salt-water inflows. Coconut farmers lost their trees. Only a small fraction of fishers have new equipment. The fields, I am told, need at least an entire rainy season to recover, and new coconut trees need six years before they can bear fruit. Countless other wage earners had worked hand in hand with the fishers and farmers, such as fish marketers and coconut oil workers. Now they are also out of work.

In Tacloban the people of Barangays 88, 89 and 90, where well over 1,000 people died, have taken advantage of every economic opportunity offered even while receiving food aid. For example, they worked with the Holy Spirit sisters to make the fishing boats they will use. They scavenge, vend food products in the city, and search for casual employment. They put up sari-sari stores with the financing they got from the Tzu Chi Foundation.

The need is not for a closure, but for an expansion, of cash-for-work programs. There is a need for large public works programs that, for example, can build sea walls to mitigate future storm surges, build artificial reefs to allow for the replenishment of the fish stock, remove debris,  and make public improvements in communities.

We should also remember that Samar and Leyte have always been among the country’s poorest provinces. There was never much economic fat on most people in these provinces, and Yolanda took that little away. They have a long road in front of them before they reach some level of economic sufficiency.

Some donors are afraid that too long a period of food relief will encourage people to be dependent. I am reminded of the words of sociologist Gelia Castillo of the University of the Philippines Los Baños: “If poor people really depended on the Philippine government for the necessities of life, they would be dead by now.”

Ordinary men and women don’t like to beg or line up for food. Whether they have food relief or not, poor people will strive to find work. With work comes self-respect, which all people seek. Food relief may make some families overly dependent, but they are not many. Isn’t it an awful indictment of a nation’s people to say food relief can dull their sense of dignity as human beings?

We ask the government and the United Nations to monitor the actual situation of the poor closely to judge if they have sufficient income and will not be hurt if the food relief is shut down a month from now. It would be a great cruelty to allow our poor people to fall back into food poverty just because we have followed a general norm without an intense inspection of the actual situation on the ground. Please take another close look.

Since the days of ancient Greece and the Hippocratic Oath, doctors have been told that their first duty is “not to do harm.” I suggest we make that our first rule in this matter of the food relief cutoff.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates (urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com).

A little girl’s signature

I remember an old dispute between two very good friends—Ed Gerlock, former Maryknoll priest who has worked with farmers and the aged poor all his life, and Columban Fr. Mickey Martin, a genuine hero of the sugar farmers of Negros Oriental and former Irish football star. It was over a little street child signing her name for the first time.


Ed helped run an informal school and shelter for street children, which was housed in the Malate Church compound. Mickey was the parish priest. One little girl who came to the shelter couldn’t, or wouldn’t, write her name. She had the experts stumped: She was the only child who didn’t want to write. Then something happened, to which my friends had completely distinct reactions.

The little girl had written her name, but she had chosen to use a rusty nail in writing it on the fender of a brand-new car owned by one of the parish’s benefactors that was parked in the church compound. Ed was delighted: The girl had come in out of the darkness. Mickey was horrified: Who was to blame, and what would he tell the woman owner?

As the dispute developed, I could imagine what the two men might have thought of each other. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Mickey secretly thought that Ed was delighted that the little girl was not only writing, but was also striking a blow for social justice in picking out a new car for her first signature. Ed may have thought that Mickey was, deep down, more of a capitalist than the bred-in-the-bone friend of the poor he had been all those years with the sugar workers.

The two men are friends again. Little girls are still searched for rusty nails, of course.

In that old debate and the present people-government debates, both sides have arguable points. For example, the government has the right to evict poor families under certain conditions for the common good, but it must observe the rules imposed by the Philippines’ Constitution and laws and the United Nations Covenants on Human Rights it has signed. We should add here that Christianity and Islam have championed these rights since long before there was a Philippine government or a UN.

The government should also abide by the clear promises President Aquino has made to the poor, such as in-city, near-city resettlement. This position of the President acknowledges that the distant relocation sites the government once established—where no jobs were available—were a clear wrong that needed correction. No side has all the strong points, however. Anyway, in a democracy we don’t have to win by a knockout; a close decision is enough. Democracies compromise.

As I write this, a meeting is going on downstairs in our office of urban poor people. It is noisy, but music to the ears of people who desire more people’s participation in national affairs. The people are discussing the government announcement that it will evict some 16,000 poor families before May 15, either because their lives are endangered (families living in stilt houses on the waters of our Metro Manila esteros and rivers) or because the government wants them out for other reasons (for example, so it can build revetments or dredge the waters).

The debate at this moment may be about these 15,800 families. We hesitate to say “only 15,000,” since it is already a big figure, but the families concerned will grow in number very rapidly when we take into account the entire Flood Control Plan in which 209,000 families will be resettled—over a million men, women and children. Let us talk, therefore, about the 209,000 families. The Department of Public Works and Highways divides them into 154,728 families on the Pasig River-Metro Manila area and 54,800 families around Laguna Lake.

The sad truth is that deep down, the urban poor organizations don’t believe that government agencies care much about their welfare. They see the care and resources the government has put into the engineering plans of the flood control program, but do not see how it is preparing in an equally careful way for the resettlement of the 209,000 families. The government has little, if any, land set aside for their resettlement. It lacks accurate figures on how many poor families need to be relocated. Indeed, it may lack accurate figures on the total number of urban poor families in all of Metro Manila. The government says they number about 540,000, but the Asian Development Bank in 2004 said there were five million urban poor individuals in Metro Manila, or one million families.

What do poor people want of the government in this matter of the 209,000 families? They want the government to tell them in some detail what families will be resettled, and where. The government knows exactly where it will put the grand dam that will be the linchpin of the flood control work and the catchment basins. The poor also want the government to commit publicly to limiting resettlement to on-site, in-city, or near-city sites. “Near-city” means near enough so a wage earner employed in Metro Manila can commute to and from his or her home and job at affordable cost. Failure to limit resettlement along these lines flies in the face of the President’s commitment to the poor. They ask the government to make known at the beginning of each year where exactly it will resettle the families to be moved that year.

Finally, the poor want the government to treat them with respect. It is as simple as that: Bankers and lawyers are not forced onto trucks by police and shipped off to distant relocation, often in the very trucks that carry off the city garbage.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates [urbanpoorassociates@ymail.com].

New plans, old mistakes?

Commentary
By Denis Murphy
2:31 am | Monday, February 27th, 2012

Government has received from the World Bank a $1.5-million grant to plan ways of combating flooding in Metro Manila, and a $250-million loan to implement the plan, according to a story in this and other papers on Feb. 13. Readers might think such news would delight the poor families living along the region’s waterways, since it could mean their fears of flooding are at an end, and government would now have the funding to help them build a more prosperous life. Instead, the poor who know of the plan are shaking in their boots. The poor regularly lose out when government talks of flood control. In the past it has meant the demolition of their homes and painful relocation to far off, economically barren places where there are no jobs.

Not so this time, the government will say. The poor would like to be reassured, and might be so assured if three matters were taken care of. One, that the planners meet with the poor and their professional allies (architects and urban planners) before the plan is put together—that is, early on in the process—so their thinking and their experience will have a place in the preparation of the plan. They hope the government won’t wait till the plan is finished and then meet with the poor to inform them only of what has been decided. They want to have a voice in this major decision that affects their lives.

Second, the poor would have more hope of good planning results if they knew the government had already secured the land needed for decent relocation of those families whose eviction cannot be avoided. By decent relocation they mean the norms agreed to by President Aquino in his Covenant with the Urban Poor of March 6, 2010. He promised in the covenant to work to limit relocation to on-site, in-city or near-city areas. He said he would oppose any government plan that would lead to a separation between wage earners who remain in the cities (because they cannot afford to commute daily to their work from distant relocation areas) and their families. These workers return only on weekends or less often to their families. Such separation can injure and even end family life. The President said: “We will not tolerate a situation where wage earners have to stay in the city to work, while the other members of the family stay in distant relocation centers. This separation weakens and often fractures family life. We will not institutionalize such situations by building sites in the city where they will live apart from their families. As the workforce in the cities, the poor, up to the extent possible, should be given the opportunity to stay in the cities.”

Has government acquired such in-city and near-city land for the families who may be evicted? If getting the good land is left to the end game, it will not work out very well, history shows.

Thirdly, the poor and their allies would like to hear that the planners have junked the simplistic tenet, often heard in government offices, that all families living in “danger zones” as defined in the Urban Development and Housing Act (RA 7279) must be evicted if they live next to water. This opinion is not supported by reality. There has been no flooding in the esteros or river communities of the Pasig River since 1970, even during Tropical Storm “Ondoy.” These are the esteros and river communities in Manila and Makati. We should ask instead how we can improve housing in these areas so that if there ever were a once-in-a-hundred-year monster flood, the people would not be injured, nor would the flow of the flood waters be impeded.

A similar disdain of facts is shown in the statements of government people including leading environmentalists that the poor people along the banks of waterways create the bulk of pollution in the water through their human waste. They put the percentage of the poor people’s contribution as high as 70 percent. Other sources say the figure is closer to 4 percent and the real major source of pollution comes from the untreated liquid waste that pours from the toilets of nearly everyone in Metro Manila, untreated into the river and esteros. The real need is for treatment plants, not eviction.

If the contribution of the poor to pollution in the waterways is only 4 percent, it seems the Supreme Court’s willingness in 2008 to remove all the homes of poor people from the banks of waterways to clean up Manila Bay may be too grievous. Is there parity between being only 4 percent of the problem and losing your home?

The press notice of the planning grant said the plan would be presented to government in one or two months. It hardly seems possible to finish such a plan in a few months, so we should probably presume it has been largely finished already by a small group. If so, we can keep these suggestions of the people until the next time a plan is discussed. By then, there will most likely be more bad experiences to learn from.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates.

UPA Study Says Evictions Lessen

News Release September 12, 2011 In the first eight months of 2011 the number of urban poor families who experienced eviction lessened somewhat, according to a study of Urban Poor Associates’ (UPA). From January to August 2010, 8201 families were evicted in 29 demolition incidents. In the same period for this year, 7060 families in 14 demolition incidents lost their homes. Eight of this year’s evictions were on government lands, three were privately owned while the others were on lots along esteros. All 14 of the 2011 eviction incidents were considered illegal because they did not meet the legal requirements for evictions of the Urban Development and Housing Act. Evictions in San Juan, Navotas, Makati and Pasig turned violent. The number of cases in 2011 went down to 14, compared to 29 demolition incidents in 2010, but larger urban poor areas were demolished. UPA pointed out that if we compared President Noy-Noy Aquino’s first complete year in office, June 2010- June 2011, we find he had many more evictions than former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo had on average per year in her term. These eviction episodes are considered high because President Aquino signed a covenant with the urban poor during the election campaign at Del Pan Sports Complex, Tondo, Manila, March 6. The Covenant promised an end to illegal forced evictions and showed a bias for in-city relocation. Such in city-relocations have not been implemented yet. Instead demolitions have been increasing. The government’s reasons for demolitions were the cleaning of esteros and expansion of government facilities. Fire From January to May 2011, a total of 12 fires broke out in urban poor areas which affected 9,849 families. Three out of twelve fires were believed by the people to have been done intentionally to force them out of places where they have lived for more than 15 years. They thought the government used fire because it is the easiest way to remove people. The majority of families who lost their homes were not allowed to return. Most of the fire sites were privately owned. Five of the communities were on government land. A total of 6,114 families or 62 percent of the total number of affected families were not allowed to return to their homes while communities in Satima, Las pinas, Brgy. Culiat, Quezon City and Malabon City are now negotiating with the private owners to purchase the land they lived on before the fires through the Community Mortgage Program (CMP). Navotas, Quezon City and Makati declared fire areas as danger zones. This prevents the people from going back to the fire site. Navotas passed a Resolution No.2011-36 on March 4, 2011 that the area in that city is a danger zone. Quezon City declared an area a danger zone because of “congestion and condition of structures.” The Makati government can pronounce an area a danger zone if the area has a minimum of five fires blaze. The areas were cleared of all residents. These moves of the City governments were strongly opposed by the fire victims. In Laperal Compound, Makati, the clearing operation turned violent. Molotov bombs and rocks were thrown by residents at Task Force Laperal. Makati was criticized by residents for enforcing a demolition though the lot is privately owned and there had been no court order. A child died in the staging area because of pneumonia. Only 25% of the 2700 families who lost their homes were relocated to Montalban. Families in Navotas and Quezon City also resisted clearing operations. Most of them chose to stay in their original places than be relocated far from their jobs. Government Intervention Secretary of Interior and Local Government Jesse Robredo put holds on demolitions in San Juan and Makati, which were not respected. UPA Spiritual Director Fr. Robert Reyes said, “The president should do more to stop illegal evictions or else eviction will continue to rise.” Data gathered by UPA shows that there are 300,000 families still threatened with eviction in Metro Manila and the surrounding area. “The government must find win-win solutions that will uphold the interest and rights of the poor and allow the necessary infrastructure of the city to be built,” Fr. Reyes concluded. -30-

Best and worst of government

Commentary : Best and worst of government

By Denis Murphy
Philippine Daily Inquirer

Posted date: February 18, 2010

EVERY DAY IN METRO MANILA WE HAVE numerous examples of the best and worst practices of government. In Navotas, young policemen beat up poor women old enough to be their grandmothers. The women wouldn’t disperse from a barricade they had formed to protect their homes against actions of the Department of Public Works and Highways which they believed were illegal. Lawyers and other government offices agree with the women.

Meanwhile in Baseco, Manila Mayor Fred Lim and Barangay Chair Cristo Hispano have agreed to resettle 300 fire victim families in the most humane and efficient way possible.

Cora Geducos, 61, was one of the women beaten by police in Navotas along the R-10 road that runs along Manila Bay. “He held his shield against my face,” she said of the young policeman who clubbed her, “then he bent down and hit my legs and feet with his club.” She showed me her bandaged toe and the lesions on her arms. “I didn’t think they would do that to us. We were just protecting our homes and our rights as human beings. I feel very sad about what happened. It hurts to think they would do that to old women like myself.”

Sixteen other women showed their wounds, including Angelita Villaruel, Virginia Cantellas, Daisy Jalbuena and Emma Villaruel. Few wanted to give their ages.

Fr. Robert Reyes had led a prayer service in the street at which the men and women of the barricade laughed and cried, hugged one another, listened to the Scripture, prayed and sang “Ama Namin,” which has become the anthem of the oppressed ever since it was sung in the giant rallies that supported Cory Aquino before and after the snap election of 1986.

The women were also water cannoned from a distance of a few feet. The use of water cannons is illegal in such evictions. Water cannons on women!

Usually after big fires the government takes steps to keep the poor from returning to the land they occupied, because it believes it has better use for the land. The fire victims must look for land elsewhere. Mayor Lim, the barangay captain, the local people’s organization, Kabalikat and architects from the Mapua School of Architecture have agreed on something more useful.

They, too, will not allow people to return to the land they occupied, but only until the land has been surveyed and subdivided into lots, and then they can return. The new settlement will have straight roads for ambulance and fire engine access. Access is the biggest problem in most slum fires. The recent fire spread because fire trucks couldn’t get near it.

Second, the mayor and others will ask the Mapua School of Architecture to survey and plan the settlement in consultation with the people.

Third, the restructured area will be the model for the other 6,000 families living in barong-barongs in Baseco. Because the soil is very “risky” and liable to liquefaction in case of an earthquake, houses will be limited to one story. The people involved will work with neighborhood groups, including Muslim organizations and Fr. Cris Sabili and the St. Hannibal Empowerment Center (SHEC).

The fire area has been bulldozed, and now looks like an ancient battle field excavated after the ages. Individual men and women wander about on it, lost in their thoughts. The setting sun sends long shadows of playing children across the scorched ground. The people are content as they line up for relief goods; they don’t have to worry about relocation. That is, all the people except the parents of a little girl who died in the fire.

In Navotas the people live on land designated for the widening of R-10. They agree to move and they qualify in every way for the relocation ordered in the Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992. If they receive their relocation allowance, they will move.

The DPWH says it asked the National Housing Authority and other agencies to provide resettlement. When they couldn’t do so, the

DPWH claimed it had done all that was required and went ahead in another questionable way to plan the eviction. Instead of a home, it offered P21,000 to families to move, an alternative not mentioned in the law.

There is a greater willingness now even among the most influential government agencies to ignore the housing and resettlement laws. The government can deal kindly or cruelly with the poor, but there are serious consequences in this life and the next.

Denis Murphy works with the Urban Poor Associates. His email address is upa@pldtdsl.net.

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