I.    Introduction

On the occasion of the upcoming 8^th State of the Nation Address by Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, she is expected to highlight the success of her administration in increasing the value of the peso, a situation that is more a result of the downturn in the US economy than a Philippine economy actually turning for the better. She is expected to highlight a multitude of minor achievements such as her “Ramdam ang Kaunlaran” propaganda that have not necessarily impacted positively on the lives of the greater majority of Filipinos.

At the same time, Arroyo is expected to dismiss the economic difficulties faced by more than 80% of the Filipino population. High prices of food and other basic commodities, spiraling costs of oil and oil products, increasing unemployment – these are but some of the pressing issues that bear down on the Filipino family everyday, the child included.

Amid this annual charade of painting a bright picture of Philippine reality, what is the reality of the Filipino child?

In her SONA of 2007, only once did Arroyo highlight her achievements for the welfare of the nation’s future…. our children. She claimed the government invested PhP29 billion more for education than the year 2006. But the government’s consolidated third and fourth periodic reports on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child submitted by to the Geneva Committee on the Rights of the Child noted that “In the social services sector, education has had the biggest share.  However, this had declined from 51 percent in 2004 to 50 percent in 2006.“ A report by the Ecumenical Institute for Labor Education and Research (EILER) noted that national government spending on education over the period 2001-2006 fell by 22%.

She further claimed that each grade schooler is now provided his or her own book, in contrast to the previous dearth in textbooks where five school children were forced to share one book. However, a 2008 UNESCO-sponsored World Education Indicators (WEI) cross-national study revealed that two to three pupils had to share a textbook in the Philippines, where there were reported delays in textbook procurement because of budgetary constraints and distribution problems.

Such lies. If the highest authority of the land, the President, lies barefaced and glosses over the crisis situation of the Filipino children and their families, how are we expected to confront the problems children face?

This State of the Nation’s Children Alert is written and disseminated by Salinlahi Alliance for Children’s Concerns, Inc. to uncover the blanket of lies and help us confront the real picture of children. It is only when we open our eyes wide to the realities of children, have our facts straight, articulate clear directions and build an unwavering commitment can we dare dream of a society that truly respects the rights of the child.

Who are the Filipino children and what are their conditions?

Filipino children below 18 years of age comprise a population of around 38.45 million or 43.4% of the population. There is no “average” picture of the reality of the Filipino child. In a society such as the Philippines that is divided into classes, a child’s reality reflects the reality of the social class that her/ his family belongs to.

At the bottom of the pyramid-like structure of Philippine society is the large majority (around 75%) of the peasants, farm workers, and fisher folk that experience landlessness,   

Around 29 million Filipino children come from these families of farmers, indigenous people and fisher folk. They are the children who experience the most violation of their rights.

·         A 2006 study of the National Statistical Coordination Board (NCSB) entitled Development of Poverty Statistics for the Basic Sectors revealed that among the country’s basic sectors, fishermen and farmers are estimated to have the highest poverty incidence.  

·         Children of the nation’s food producers, the farmers, are growing hungrier each month because of continuing landlessness, increase in costs of farm inputs, speculation and profiteering. In the past months, the price of rice has doubled, making it more difficult for children of peasant families to enjoy the very food crop that they produce.

·         According to a survey conducted in 2001, more than 60 per cent of working children aged 5 to 17 work on farms in the country. An estimated five million families depend on seasonal contract work on sugarcane plantations, which causes many children to drop out of school.

·         Children from poor farming communities are trafficked to the cities to become factory workers, domestic helpers or prostitutes. Foreign trafficking rings brought these children to other countries like Japan, Europe, US, East Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan and China. (Matilac and Florendo, Child trafficking in Southeast Asia, February 2002).

·         Indigenous children have the highest mortality and morbidity rates and are plagued with communicable diseases. They live in forestal or mountainous areas rich in mineral and other forest resources that are targets of mining or logging companies that make use of state military forces to secure their facilities. As such, these are also communities often affected by armed conflict.

·         Children of farmers are killed, maimed, wounded, rendered orphan, or involuntarily displaced together with their parents when they support their parents’ struggle for land or just wages. Such is the case of the Hacienda Luisita Massacre of November 16, 2004. Two children were killed in this massacre, together with 117 adults injured and hospitalized, and 7 persons killed. Children of peasant and indigenous communities are the biggest number of victims of militarization and human rights violations. Over 200,000 children were forcibly displaced in various parts of the country due to militarization.

The October 2007 Labor Force Survey (LFS)  of the National Statistics Office revealed that there were 35.9 million persons in the labor force in October 2007 out of the estimated 56.9 million population 15 years old and over.

·         Low wages, housing problems, irregular employment and unemployment beset the great majority of the Philippine working class. This condition, despite Arroyo’s promises in her 2001 SONA for jobs, education, a home and food on every table, continued to spiral downwards, forcing more and more unemployed, irregularly employed or low-salaried employed workers to seek a better condition as overseas migrant workers.

·         Comparative data sourced from the National Wages and Productivity Commission by IBON Foundation, Inc. revealed that the legislated basic minimum wage in the National Capital Region, for example, had the lowest average increase per year during the 2001-2006 period of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s administration.

Legislated Basic Minimum Wage National Capital Region, in pesos
Period	Total Increase During the Period	Average per Year
1989-1994	56	9.33
1995-200	105	17.50
2001-2006	50	8.33

 

·         According to the National Statistics Office (NSO) in their 2007 report, 36.8 percent of the country’s income (GNP) is amassed by only 10% of the country’s population. That leaves only 63.2% to be shared across 90% of the country’s population, the workers included.

·         According to the National Wages and Productivity Commission, a family of 6 in the National Capital Region will need PhP882 a day or P23,640 a month to cover for its food and other basic needs (as of May 2008). The legislated basic minimum wage however, was pegged at P382, leaving a wide deficit margin of P500 a day or P15,000 a month.

·         Majority of children coming from working class families therefore, grow up impoverished, malnourished, not able to finish schooling and forced to work at supplemental jobs to help sustain the family’s survival.

Pushed by high unemployment rates, inhuman minimum wage that cannot sustain a family of six, and the Arroyo government’s insistence on it’s labor export policy, and lured by prospects of higher wages, around 2,900 Filipino workers depart for foreign destinations each day with the hope of securing a better future for their family. They leave behind an estimated 261,000 children each month who become vulnerable to abuse and who carry the brunt of migration’s social costs.

II.   Children’s Best Interest: Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

On July 7, 2005 , on the occasion of a radio release from Malacañang regarding the clamor for Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s resignation, she said that she wants “our children to grow up in a better Philippines.” How has she fared for the wellbeing of children since then?

There is no better measure for determining whether children are growing up in a better Philippines than how much the government invests on the welfare, wellbeing and protection of the rights of Filipino children. Each time the national budget is passed into law, the government trumpets the supposed increase in the budget for social welfare in billions of pesos. A closer scrutiny of the budget however, will reveal that at nominal value, the government spends a measly sum for each Filipino, and in this case, each child,

 

National Government Spending per Child per Day

	2001	2005	2006 (re-enacted)	2008
Education	5.28	4.49	4.13	4.88
Health	0.58	0.47	0.43	0.62
Housing	0.08	0.10	0.09	0.11
Debt service	12.00	23.22	24.70	18.50

 

In the consolidated third and fourth periodic reports on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child submitted by the Government of the Republic of the Philippines to the Geneva-based Committee on the Rights of the Child, the state acknowledged that it allocated “more than 30 percent of its national budget for debt service-interest payment while providing insufficient budgetary allocations for social development and children’s programmes” and highlighted this fact as “a continuing human rights and development issue and challenge.” 

The GRP report also mentioned that: “the share of social services in the total expenditures has been declining from 31.06 percent in 2002 to 28.9 percent in 2004 and then to 27.9 percent in 2006.  On the other hand, it is noted that debt service-interest payment increased by 40.4 percent from Php185.8 billion in 2002 to Php 260.9 billion in 2004 and again increased by 30.3 percent from Php 260.9 billion in 2004 to Php 339.9 billion in 2006.”

The report further noted that “In the social services sector, education has had the biggest share.  However, this had declined from 51 percent in 2004 to 50 percent in 2006.  The same trend had been observed in the share of the health sector which had declined from six (6) percent in 2004 to five (5) percent in 2006.”

Clearly, budget invested by government on children is not enough to make each child grow up in a better Philippines. Notwithstanding the insufficiency of budgetary allocations to ensure children’s wellbeing, unprecedented scales of corruption continue to further drain whatever little resource there is out of the “mouth of babes” and into the personal pockets of those in the highest echelons of government.

Salinlahi linked the money pocketed by the Arroyo family from various anomalous government projects between the period 2001 to 2007 to resources that could have been well spent on education, health and other services that promote the rights of the child. The table below shows how children could have benefited from proper use of these sums.

 

Examples of Corruption-riddled project	Amount pocketed by Arroyos / cronies	Estimated benefits to children’s rights to SURVIVAL	Estimated benefits to children’s rights to DEVELOPMENT
Jose Pidal Expose	PhP 300-400 M	3 full meals daily for 10,959 to 14,612 malnourished children, for one year (PhP 75.00 a day)	Books for 2,000 libraries at PhP150,000 per library in a poor community
Fertilizer Funds	PhP 728 M	One year supply of 1 sack of rice per month for 33,700 poor families (PhP1,800/sack)	One year’s salary for 3,733 public school teachers at PhP15,000 a month
Diosdado Maca-pagal Boulevard (5.1Km)	PhP 536 M	63,000 families with monthly supply of 1 LPG tank for one year (PhP700/tank)	Operational expenses for 900 day care centers for one year (PhP600,000)
National Broadband Network - ZTE	PhP 5.2B	11,400 rural doctors’ salary for one year (at PhP35,000 per month)	34,667 classrooms for public schools (at PhP150,000 per classroom)

Based on these self-admitted insufficiencies in the budgetary allocation, coupled with rampant corruption as major indicators of the government’s capacity to ensure the children’s best interest, it is clear that Arroyo administration is far from delivering its mandate to the children. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its General Comment No. 5 (CRC/GC/2003/5 paras.45-47) stated that ‘Every legislative, administrative and judicial body or institution is required to apply the best interests principle by systematically considering how children’s rights and interests are or will be affected by their decisions and actions – by, for example, a proposed or existing law or policy or administrative action or court decision, including those which are not directly concerned with children, but indirectly affect children’.

 

III.  Where Floats the Bangkang Papel?

In her first SONA, Gloria Arroyo appropriated the imagery of the bangkang papel letters sent by urban poor children to Malacanang. The letters contained the children’s demands for their most violated rights – education, housing and jobs. Gloria Arroyo pounced on these key words as the core of the vision for her administration.

Seven years hence, where floats the bangkang papel dreams of the children?

On June 28, 2002, Malacanang came out with a press release that the administration had fulfilled its commitments to the victims of the landslide tragedy in Payatas, Quezon City. Between the years 2001 to 2007, more than PhP800,000 were provided by government and other donors for the education and livelihood needs of these six bangkang papel children (only three were mentioned in the 2001 SONA) and their families as well as for more than 500 other children-victims of the Payatas tragedy.

The bangkang papel response, when viewed from a child rights perspective, reveals the transitory and palliative nature of the Arroyo administration’s programs to address violations of children’s rights.  Programs such as the food-for-school, P500 subsidy for electricity and student loans falsely labeled as scholarships are a few examples of “band-aid solutions” that do not address the root causes of rights violations in children. Responses such as these exposes the sham behind Arroyo’s statement that she wants “our children to grow up in a better Philippines.”

IV. Conclusions

This cursory appraisal of the Arroyo administration’s performance in relation to the fulfillment of children’s rights between the periods 2001 to 2008 reveals that it has failed dismally as the primary duty bearer in the promotion, protection and fulfillment of the rights of children.

Through the continuous efforts of the Arroyo administration and its cohorts in Congress to block the passage of a legislated wage increase and genuine agrarian reform bills , the removal of the R-VAT in oil, utilities and other basic needs, etc, children from the basic sectors – the workers, farmers and the urban poor – suffer as their parents suffer.

The Arroyo administartion has committed not only sins of omission but sins of commission as well against the future generation of this nation. It has violated the rights of a large majority of Filipino children to survival, development, protection and participation.

It turns a blind eye to the millions of children, especially those of poor rural and urban communities, who are forced to bear the pain of hunger each day. Children are maimed, displaced, and even killed by its program of militarizing not only rural but urban communities as well, and conveniently labeled as “collateral damage” in the government’s “war against terror” that in itself is terrorizing children. It blames the parents and calls them irresponsible when their children drop out from school, even if the biggest number of these drop outs comes from families that are in such dire financial straits that they cannot afford to provide for their children’s daily school expenses.

Amidst this very real picture of the crisis situation that children are in, the Arroyo administration even has the audacity to steal and pocket for themselves millions of pesos from corruption-riddled projects. 

Children and their families, especially those from marginalized sectors of the society such as farmers, fisher folk, indigenous families, workers and urban poor families, as well as child rights advocates, have an obligation to defend and fight for their rights.  In the face of the Arroyo administration’s utter disregard for their rights, children and their families, as well as child rights advocates, are duty-bound to actively clamor and work for the ouster of the number one violator of the rights of children – Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. ###