(Sixth of a series)

MANILA, Philippines?Rodolfo Socorro came a long way from his picture-pretty coconut farm to see a vision turn into a nightmare a day after his arrival in the city.

A gang of blue-uniformed enforcers of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority upended his cartload of mangoes for violating a ban on vending on sidewalks.

?Why are you doing this to me,? he cries, ?I am not a thief.?

The enforcers threw his cart onto their truck, along with his weighing scale, ignoring his pleas.

Before the vehicle sped away from the scattered mangoes in front of the National Housing Authority at the Quezon Memorial Circle on a sunny Thursday morning, a reporter approached the gang leader and asked who he was.

?Santos,? he barks. ?Santos, Clemente.?

He may well be Inspector Javert declaring to Jean Valjean, ?I administer the law?good, bad, or indifferent.? Except that this character from Les Miserables exists for one class of society in what a Filipino economist calls an ?oligarchic state? practicing ?booty capitalism.?

The playing field is far from level in the country, regarded as one of the world?s most corrupt.

?I may have sinned in the eyes of man,? says Socorro, his voice breaking, tears welling in his eyes. ?I know I have done nothing wrong in the eyes of God.?

As Socorro gathers his mangoes, office workers take pity on him. They press peso bills into his palm before walking away, shaking their heads. ?Salamat po,? he says.

The 38-year-old father of two had left his Pambujan hometown in Northern Samar province at the edge of the Pacific at 9 a.m. on Tuesday.

He had paid P680, about all the money he had, for fare on the Elavil bus that took him to Allen on the northwestern tip of the island, then a ferry to Matnog in Sorsogon, finally reaching Cubao in Quezon City before dawn the next day.

He was going to look for his wife, a caregiver in Project 4. He would join her and find a job, anything that would make life easier for the family with two kids in elementary school.

Promises, promises

The 1.5-hectare coconut farm, which he shares with 10 siblings, yields copra worth P1,500 every three months these days.

The price of copra is down, he says. Even in the best of times, when the harvest fetched P3,000, the income was barely enough.

Northern Samar?doormat to howlers smacking the country from the Pacific and a sanctuary for the communist New People?s Army?gained entry into the list of the country?s 10 poorest provinces in a survey conducted in 2006 by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB).

Sulu?home to the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf bandit group?is on top, with eight of 10 families classified as poor?ironically a representation of the income inequality nationwide.

Socorro belongs to a group of Filipinos comprising a third of the population of over 90 million surviving on less than a dollar a day?the poverty threshold defined by the World Bank.

They are the object of courtship in political ads saturating prime time TV as the nation heads towards the May 10 elections. Presidential aspirants promise them deliverance from Dante?s inferno.

The NSCB says that the number of poor people in the country increased from 25.5 million in 2000 to 27.6 million?33 percent of the population?in 2006.

The Social Weather Stations says self-rated poverty went down from 59 percent in March 2001 to 51 percent in October 2009. But the number of poor families went up from 8.6 million to 9.4 million, or 43 million to 47 million, using an average of five per family.

Rural phenomenon

In both income-based and self-rated poverty measures, poverty has gone from bad to worse, even as the economy was growing. From 2001 to 2003, the average gross domestic product growth rate was 5.3 percent.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) says in a 2008 study that poverty is a ?predominantly rural phenomenon? affecting 75 percent of the population, mostly farmers and fishermen.

ADB blames this on decades-long problems in agriculture, where growth has not been sustained for a host of reasons?lack of investments, booming population.

A score of typhoons bedevil the country annually and likely to become more violent as a result of worsening climate change. Storms ?Ondoy? and ?Pepeng? showed this last year, as well as the prolonged dry spell wrought by El Niño now sweeping across large parts of the archipelago.

There is little access to wealth for the rural folk, mainly because of the failure of the 21-year-old agrarian reform program opposed by wealthy land owners.

The problem is compounded by insurgencies, inadequate delivery of agricultural services and weak governance as President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo grappled with political problems sparked by ?Hello Garci,? the vote-rigging controversy that has tainted her legitimacy.

Classic state failure

Many of the rural poor flee to urban areas, such as Metro Manila and Cebu and Davao cities, drawn by prospects of jobs and education.

They congregate in squalid squatter colonies that are prone to flooding, fires, diseases and criminality.

There, they build makeshift houses of salvaged materials without clean water, sanitation or electricity, putting pressure on infrastructure and the ability of the cities to provide basic services. They have no access to health care, credit or capital.

?It?s a classic state failure situation,? says Corazon ?Dinky? Soliman, former secretary of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). ?A state in a democracy is supposed to provide the basic social services infrastructure, especially for the poorer communities.?

Whatever service government provides is simply a tool of ?patronage politics,? she says.

It?s been like this even before Ms Arroyo?s time, to be fair, Soliman says. ?She perfected the art, in a way, and that?s one of the reasons I left.?

Families living in carts

She says the most glaring evidence of poverty is the sight, for the first time, of whole families living in carts and tricycles in the streets.

?It?s a most dangerous situation for children. Their health is vulnerable. Worse, they?re vulnerable to prostitution, to drug pushers. They become mules and drug carriers. They learn to steal. It?s the way of the streets,? says Soliman.

Why is this country, so rich in natural resources, so poor?

The American political writer James Fallows blames it on a ?damaged culture.? He notes that the Corazon Aquino administration that ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in the 1986 People Power Revolution was nothing but a restoration of the old oligarchy.
ADB says that while poverty incidence has been gradually declining over the past 25 years, existing levels remain high.

?Poverty in the Philippines has persisted for almost three decades even as Malaysia and Thailand, which had similar economies to the Philippines in the 1960s, have almost eradicated it,? the bank says.

Non-poor become poor

In its assessment shared by Filipino academics and economists, ADB says that the Philippines has made little inroads in easing the number of poor Filipinos, blaming it on the failure of the economy to grow rapidly and to generate quality employment.

This has constrained opportunities of the poor to escape deprivation and increased the probability of the non-poor to become poor.

Growth has been confined to a few sectors, such as the export-oriented semiconductor industry, telecommunications, business process outsourcing, real estate, housing and retail trade.

Most of these are in the services sectors, which are being supported by remittances from overseas Filipino workers to their families in the Philippines operating small businesses.

?The share of industrial and manufacturing employment, where relatively stable and higher quality jobs are usually found, has declined over the years. The agriculture sector?s share in employment also fell significantly, from 61.2 percent in 1960 to 51.4 percent in 1980 and down to 36.1 percent in 2007,? ADB says.

?In rural areas, soil erosion, coastal and marine-system degradation, deforestation and biodiversity are causing a decline in agricultural productivity that threatens the livelihoods of the poor. In cities, there has been exposure by the poor to congestion and polluted air and water.?

Far from millennium goal

In short, says Sen. Edgardo Angara, the country is far from reaching the Millennium Development Goal of eradicating poverty and hunger in 2015. ?The dismal performance of the agriculture sector remains the primary cause,? he says.

A position paper by University of the Philippines economics professors Dante B. Canlas, Benjamin E. Diokno and Felipe M. Medalla says that the first order of business for the next administration is to broaden the tax base. This would bring about higher revenues to reduce the budget deficit and finance public goods and social protection programs.

Arsenio M. Balisacan, director of the Southeast Asian Regional Center for Graduate Study and Research in Agriculture, offers ?alternative pathways out of rural poverty? at a forum last year.

Balisacan?s prescriptions: Rural economy should be diversified, expanding employment opportunities in non-farm activities; development of infrastructure to promote connectivity, especially between urbanizing and lagging communities; investing in education and health care to enhance opportunities for migration to rapidly growing sectors; setting up market-friendly institutions; enforcement of property rights; and ease of land use conversion to reflect market needs.

In 2003, the World Bank, in collaboration with the DSWD, initiated a $100-million poverty mitigation program patterned after the Opportunidades in Mexico and the highly successful Bolsa Familia, or family grant, in Brazil, where it was able to reduce poverty by 27 percent.

Conditional cash transfer

Here, the conditional cash transfer (CCT) program calls for injecting cash into the very poor areas to stimulate economic activity. Families within the poverty income level are provided P1,500 every month on condition that children attend school consistently. Mothers submitting to prenatal health care get a monthly stipend of P800.

Unlike the rice subsidy scheme where beneficiary targeting is skewed, in the CCT scheme, recipients are screened by representatives of local government units and NGOs. There is a complementary grievance mechanism to check abuses.

Bert Hofman, World Bank country representative, is so upbeat that he hopes the government could divert pork barrel funds to the program.

The pilot project is now being rolled out in areas where there are schools and health clinics whose absence?what is euphemistically called the supply side?prevents its implementation.

Escape to Dickensian spectacle

That is why people like Socorro continue to flee an otherwise idyllic rural setting for the Dickensian spectacle in the capital that he found on his arrival.

Temporary accommodation had meant spending the night on the pavement at nearby Philcoa commercial center beside the mango cart of a friend, Leo Surio, 40, also from Pambujan.

Surio, who came to the city two months ago, used the wooden contraption for his livelihood by day and sleeping quarters at night.

The day the MMDA force struck, Surio had to go to the bank to send money back home, income he had earned two months after he tried his luck in the city with a loan from his brother-in-law.

Surio had asked Socorro to take his merchandise to his usual slot in the corner.

The dusky Socorro, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, was attending to a customer when the enforcers came. Several dozen vendors, used to the crackdowns, scampered away, pushing carts laden with fruits and fresh vegetables.

Socorro was caught flat-footed. ?I didn?t know it?s not allowed,? he says. He says he was so angry to disappoint his friend he wanted to fight back, but decided prudence was the better part of valor.

It?s a seething temper held in check many times over across the nation among people caught in a social ferment that could give the incoming administration a nightmare more than it can handle.