The Duterte administration can end the lockdown sooner and help every Filipino in need. It can raise the resources needed for this if it lets go of its infrastructure fantasies, prioritizes life over debt, and is bolder in tapping the accumulated wealth of elites and large corporations. Not doing any of these means making the people bear the disproportionate burden of dealing with the pandemic.
A closer look shows that the government is not actually spending as much as it claims, IBON said. This casts doubts on its real efforts to battle the pandemic, especially when it comes to the most vulnerable Filipinos.
But as they say in mountaineering, there can always be several approaches to the summit – a gradual meandering ascent or a direct assault. Whichever we choose, as we commemorate this day, we definitely commit that it is going to be a view of a better future.
IBON executive director Sonny Africa said that the government’s obsession with so-called creditworthiness is blinding it to how a moratorium can help give much more, and much more quickly, to the poor amid the raging coronavirus crisis and its burdensome impact.
At the end of the original month-long lockdown period and on the first day of its extension, research group IBON said that the government is still failing to give millions of poor and vulnerable Filipinos the socioeconomic relief they need.
The group said that millions of poor and vulnerable families are facing unnecessary difficulty in meeting their basic needs under the lockdown. The government needs to show greater political will and do away with bureaucratic obstacles to relief efforts.
Research group IBON said that that the Duterte administration’s first official report on COVID-19 efforts only underscored just how government response to the worst public health crisis the country has ever faced is slow, insufficient, and insensitive.
With the increase of operators setting up shop in the Philippines, you would think the government is milking the POGO phenomenon by generating lots of revenue through taxes. But it turns out that this isn’t the case. Out of the Php50 billion in revenues expected from POGOs, only Php5 billion or just 10% of these revenues have been remitted to the government.
The Chinese government has already asked the Philippines to stop the licensing of all POGO operations due to possible illegal activities. PAGCOR, however, has only suspended the issuance of new licenses while continuing existing licenses and renewals. This call from the Chinese government is a hypocrisy. China has banned gambling in its shores, but operators only moved out of China and went to countries offering better incentives.
IBON estimates that rice farmers in aggregate suffered a total income loss of Php84.8 billion in 2019 due to the catastrophic drop in palay farmgate prices. This is equivalent to an average income loss of some Php35,328 per rice farmer.
