ISSUE ANALYSIS No. 13
Series of 2009

The Bane of Development Illusion
Persons displaced by disasters to leap from 2.6M in 2005 to 10M by end-2009

In the years ahead, the number and magnitude of disasters will increase with colossal human and economic losses. The task of rescue, recovery, relief and rehabilitation will have to fall more and more on the people themselves as they have in fact done in recent years.

By the Policy Study, Publication, and Advocacy (PSPA)
Center for People Empowerment in Governance (CenPEG)
October 15, 2009

Having gone through the shocks and pains of failed development strategies by government, it is high time for the people through their community organizations, progressive legislators, and their local counterparts to intervene in mapping out future development programs. There are venues and forums where alternative development strategies can be voiced out with the scheduled investigations in Congress and class suits as some of the first steps.

Even before the onset of climate change – which is blamed by many Arroyo officials as the culprit behind the devastations wrought by Typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng – the impact of natural- and man-made disasters in the Philippines was already catastrophic. One just needs to track the scale and magnitude of disasters in recent years in terms of losses of human lives, property, infrastructures, and the economy to make a review of government’s development tacks urgent.

The Philippines is now the world’s fourth most disaster-prone country (after China, India, and Iran) and also fourth in the number of persons killed, injured, or missing as a result of calamities. The impact of disasters, including typhoons, floods, monsoon rains, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, as well as human-induced disasters has worsened in recent years. In 10 years (1992-2001), close to 6 million Filipinos were killed or injured as a result of natural- or man-made calamities, reports of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies showed.

The rising toll on human lives can also be attributed to the increase in the number of reported disaster incidents: from 199 in 2001, it leaped to 313 in 2002 and 384 in 2005. Separate reports by the non-government Citizens Disaster Response Center (CDRC) show that although the number of disasters slightly went down to 236 in 2007 and 253 in 2008, the number of displaced individuals showed quantum leaps from 2.6 million in 2005 to 4.3 million in 2007 and doubling again in 2008, with 8.5 million. This year with just two typhoons, Ondoy and Pepeng, uprooting already 6 million persons based on partial accounts the total number of people affected by all types of disasters could jump anywhere from 8 million to 10 million by December. Floods consistently topped the biggest number of persons displaced.

Overarching impact

The impact of disasters is over-arching. Aside from fatalities and massive numbers of evacuees, disasters destroy almost everything that lie in their paths from dikes to farms, houses and infrastructures such as roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, to power and telecommunication lines. Government authorities usually estimate only the short-term impact of disasters while they gloss over the far-reaching consequences such as loss of livelihood, inability to recoup damaged property, food and health crisis, as well as psychological trauma that cry for an all-sided, long-term rehabilitation and recovery.   

As narrow as their lack of disaster preparedness and preventive measures is, government authorities fail to see the connection between disaster and economic management.

A consensus had long been reached particularly in the NGO community and progressive academe in the 1970s-1980s that the impact of disasters brought about by typhoons, earthquakes, and other natural occurrences is aggravated by human-induced disasters resulting from deforestation, mining operations, dam construction, militarization of the countryside, and other “development aggression” projects. The alarm rung by environmentalists, community organizers, scientists, journalists, and social advocates, however, fell on deaf ears as both national executives and legislators adopted hook, line, and sinker development strategies prescribed by the World Bank, IMF, and Asian Development Bank (ADB) to attract foreign investment and help government pay a mounting foreign debt.

Thereafter, infrastructural development led by the construction of irrigation and hydro-electric mega dams, a proposed nuclear power plant, and other projects was pushed more aggressively even as lands, mountains, and watersheds were opened up further for mining operations while logging operations continued despite calls for moratorium. Safety nets such as environmental impact assessment (EIA) and public consultation were largely ignored as many local government units (LGUs) supported the projects in anticipation of kickbacks and other benefits. To contain local opposition, project areas were militarized.

Meanwhile, import substitution, trade liberalization, land conversions, and other strategies were implemented transforming vast agricultural lands for commercial export while the domestic market was pried open for the influx of cheap foreign imports. The result, as even architects of globalization would admit later, was unprecedented economic corrosion. GDP growth - as claimed by economic managers – could not hide rising poverty levels, the displacement of small producers, job losses, and an increasing number of urban poor families.

Critical levels

As development strategies were increasingly adopted, the destruction of the environment approached critical levels and so is the vulnerability of bigger populations to all types of calamity. Profits reaped by developers and investors increased in proportion to human and economic losses, burying hopes for a better life in a vast sea of poverty. Disasters used to wreak havoc mainly on the poor; nowadays, even middle-income communities are uprooted as can be seen in the onslaughts of Ondoy and Pepeng.

The economy and human development is in a worse shape courtesy of these flawed development strategies and the widespread corruption where much of the funds earmarked for projects line up the pockets of erring politicians.

Take the case of the San Roque hydro-electric dam in San Manuel, Pangasinan. Planned by the Ramos administration in 1994 as Asia’s biggest, the construction of the $1.2 billion dam was begun under Estrada and completed under Arroyo. From the start the project was opposed by the Ibalois and the Cordillera People’s Alliance (CPA) not only because it threatened to submerge their ancestral lands, as their fellow Igorots had experienced in the Ambuklao and Binga dams in Benguet, but that it also lay close to the Digdig earthquake fault zone. Independent scientists and an EIA warned that the dam’s life will be short due to expected siltation and mine tailings that are worse than in the Benguet dams which are now barely inoperable. Three mines operate in the San Roque watershed – itself already denuded.

Because the San Roque dam’s reservoir is designed to contain only small floods, warned Dr. Peter Willing of the U.S. Water Resources Consulting, severe flooding would engulf the whole Pangasinan and most of the Tarlac plains. That was 10 years ago. The private consortium which runs the dam, the San Roque Multipurpose Project (SRMP) under a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the National Power Corporation continues to rake in profits while millions of farmers and other residents suffer incalculable losses.

In the years ahead, the number and magnitude of disasters will increase with more colossal human and economic losses. With government’s deep bias for private gain at the expense of public interest and its disaster “management” bedeviled by fund shortages and corruption, the task of rescue, recovery, relief and rehabilitation will have to fall more and more on the people themselves as they have in fact done in recent years. Because of this the people through their organizations, NGOs, and citizens’ groups earn the right to intervene in crafting disaster preparedness and prevention programs along with the allocation and management of state resources. Decades of government neglect as well as criminal negligence and incompetence make people empowerment and alternative governance more imperative.

In the short term, there are minimum interventions that can be pushed. Among these are: The investigation and prosecution of those accountable for the loss of human lives and economic destruction which could have been prevented or mitigated by competent disaster management; compensation and adequate rehabilitation to all victims and survivors of recent tragedies; the immediate rehabilitation if not de-commissioning of monster dams, with the costs to be billed on government and private operators; moratorium to debt payments and the use of funds allocated for rehabilitation and recovery; complete ban to logging and limiting mining operations only to local production and industrialization;

Reactivate constitutionally-mandated people’s councils in the LGUs; convene a rehabilitation and recovery citizens’ council; immediate review of all major existing and programmed infrastructure projects; higher budget for research and development for disaster prevention as well as alternative, eco-friendly sources of energy; and the overhaul of economic strategies by closely integrating disaster prevention with development goals.

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