Easter is about a fresh start. The sins and omissions of the past are of the past and the time has come for change in the hope of better outcomes.
In the temperate countries, Easter happens in Spring and Mother Nature celebrates the fresh start with green leaves sprouting out of barren tree twigs and branches. Colorful flowers once again bring life to what was a desolate winter landscape.
We make mistakes in the course of our lives that bring us down and make us lose hope. But the secret in living is doing fresh starts. Even our computers need that sometimes and we call that reboot, restart, refresh.
But when it comes to running our country, our leaders are deathly afraid of fresh starts. They insist on the same old programs that have failed for decades.
Someone (it could have been Einstein, Benjamin Franklin or a Chinese proverb) once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It describes the approach our government has taken through several administrations with regard to national problems. Totally insane!
I realize that with a little more than a year left in P-Noy’s watch, he will have little desire to tinker with failed programs. He did nothing for almost five years because it is easier to blame past administrations for continuing failure. There is such a thing as getting comfortable with failure and we have perfected that art and called it resilience.
Business ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1
Introducing innovative policies is politically risky but it is a good way to use political brownie points. New approaches can’t be expected to produce positive outcomes overnight. Indeed, entrenched vested interests will make life even more miserable for a true leader if he tried to take away their lollipops.
Take CARP for instance. We have tried various versions of it through decades and somehow failed to make the life of farmers better. Indeed, life became even more challenging for those farmers who got a piece of paper proclaiming ownership over a few hectares. Rice farming (and sugar as well) depends on economies of scale and CARP went against that reality.
A respected Filipino economist, a national scientist no less, has written on why our attempts at agrarian reform failed. Dr Raul Fabella is not in favor of extending CARP beyond its expiry date and he has proposed other means of lifting farmers out of poverty.
Dr Fabella thinks it is more important to see an improvement in the efficiency of our country’s food production. That will reduce the price of rice to the ultimate consumer (including rice farmers who buy the rice they eat during off season).
I am told that in Vietnam, consumers pay half of what we are paying for the price of rice. Lower price of rice leads to lower labor costs and that will improve our industrial competitiveness.
Maybe, P-Noy the haciendero is the wrong President to attempt a rewrite of our agrarian reform program. But I see no reason why he cannot overhaul the system with help from Dr. Fabella. His oath of office demands he acts as President of the country, not the Cojuangco family.
Then there is charter change. There was a time when politicians in power must be prevented from tinkering with the Constitution. All they wanted was to extend their terms or kill the provision on political dynasties. But today, the constitution is truly outdated.
It would have been alright if our Constitution was written to be more of a declaration of general principles and Congress can pass the legislation needed to give those principles life. But the folks who wrote the Constitution, all appointed rather than elected, overwrote it. They were too specific in many provisions that now look irrelevant and even funny.
Take the provision that requires 100 percent Filipino ownership of mass media and 70 percent for advertising companies. That provision was supposed to protect Filipinos from foreign media content that will damage our cultural heritage.
In the digital and social media age, not even China can fully put up a great wall to keep the influence of foreign media and foreign culture out. Today, Filipinos are among the most enthusiastic users of Facebook and Twitter.
As for CNN, they have been around for the longest time through SkyCable. Lately, they took over free to air Channel 9 with CNN Philippines, a partnership with former Ambassador Tony Cumagon Chua.
Bloomberg had also long been available on SkyCable. Soon they will also have a Bloomberg Philippines channel on Cignal, the PLDT satellite-based pay television service.
Just look at the channel line-up of SkyCable and Cignal and realize how the objective of that constitutional provision has become utterly out of date. Irrelevant!
It is the same thing in advertising. The framers of the Constitution thought Filipino-owned agencies would be protective of local culture. Of course, that is ridiculous and anyone exposed to locally-made advertising will laugh at the claim.
The provision also didn’t stop the big guns of the international advertising industry from doing business here. As in other protected industries, foreigners only have to use dummies otherwise known as Filipino partners to make everything legal.
While some local partners are very professional and contributed a lot of creativity to the combined entity’s output (Mon Jimenez of Tourism comes to mind), there are some who are plain rent-seekers.
The Constitution made rent-seeking a livelihood for many lazy Filipinos, not just in advertising. Rent seeking increased the cost of doing business as well as the cost to the end consumer of many essential products and services.
The ownership restriction forced some of our best law firms to become experts in legal contortion as they tried to make it possible for foreigners to get into industries the Constitution limited to Filipinos.
In a way, these outdated economic restrictions in our Constitution prevent the entry of more investments by world class companies that could create more jobs for our job-hungry population. These restrictions also protect the oligarchy from world class competition that could benefit consumers with lower prices and higher quality. We need a more open economy or risk being left behind by Vietnam and Myanmar in attracting Foreign Direct Investments (FDI).
But not all needed change requires constitutional revision. Well within the power of the President to fix is that nagging problem of food price inflation. The high cost of food is the main reason why our labor costs have made us uncompetitive in our region.
Many economists, including the current Director-General of NEDA, have long ago pointed to the misguided NFA policies as the problem. The debt of NFA has grown by leaps and bounds and is now at a level (P176.7 billion in June 30, 2010, now down to P151.8 billion as of March 15, 2015) that is higher than the national defense budget (P142 billion).
NFA is now proposing that the National Treasury just absorb all that to clean up NFA’s books. Consider what P150 billion can buy in terms of investments in our people’s health, education and welfare… or vitally needed infrastructure.
But there are so many rent seekers using the poor rice farmers as the excuse for not changing the current system. A new beginning requires drastic change.
Lifting QR is expected to bring down the price of rice for the consumer. Government can take care of the farmers in some other more direct way. Right now, only the cartel of rice traders benefit from quantitative restriction on imports.
NFA policies are supposed to help farmers, but they are as miserable as ever. The average age of farmers is now 57, or three years away from the retirement age of 60.
“In the Philippine setting, a new generation of Filipinos refuses to go to farming and that is a threat to food security,” Kiko Pangilinan, the de facto Agri chief said.
These are but a few examples of areas for fresh beginnings. Sticking to the same old and discredited policies is insane.
In this season of new beginnings, our political leaders should not be afraid to try new approaches specially because the old ones haven’t worked. Unless there is courage to go against the vested interests, the masses of our poor will only grow in number and desperation. Our positive macro economic indicators will be a mirage for most of them. Keeping our people poor is unchristian for this Christian country.
There is still time for P-Noy to leave a lasting legacy, even if time is fast running out for his administration. But it would take boldness on P-Noy’s part to try new solutions to old problems. After all, these new solutions have worked elsewhere and it isn’t as if these could be more risky than staying the course we all know hasn’t worked and never will.
Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco
