ILIGAN CITY (Mindanao Examiner / Apr. 27, 2013) – The Anak Mindanao party list said the Gross Domestic Product increase claimed by the Aquino administration and the recent National Statistic Coordination Board research result on high incidence of poverty and hunger in the Philippines are two clear contradicting pictures of the Philippine society.
It said while the few enjoyed their economic and political control and manipulation, majority of the citizens are suffering massive poverty.
“Poorest regions, provinces and communities can be found in Mindanao resulting to massive migration to the urban and rural centers as well as abroad. Those have been the option for the labor-forces living the countryside to search for greener pasture. Though we have a rich agricultural (land and coastal) resources, but it turned out to be a gift for foreign and big business corporations,” it said in a statement sent to the Mindanao Examiner.
It said the vast lands and mineral reserves have been extracted and used by multinational corporations displacing and harassing the indigenous peoples and poor communities. Aside from pushing them into poverty risk, this so-called extractive policy on natural and mineral reserves has also dangerous and destructive effects.
In the Mindanao, the struggle for the right to self-determination is not the root cause of poverty among the communities but it is the framework of the Philippine government as to how these communities should control or manage their resources.
It said the struggle for right to self-determination only arises when the native inhabitants’ rights over their political, economic and cultural lives as distinct entities are stolen from them. It is always militarization is the best way to drive out the communities and to suppress their resistance.
Anak Mindanao said it was dismayed by the Department of Labor and Employment’s “no wage increase” announcement, since unemployment and low income are interrelated causes of the poverty situation in the country.
“Well, this should not be a surprise announcement because the platform and direction of Aquino’s economic policy is neither pro-worker nor pro-people. The Public-Private Partnership economic policy is a disguised face of the implementation of the neo-liberal policies like privatization, contractualization, deregulation, liberalization and violent militarization. Primarily, it catered big business monopoly and repressed workers unions and even put the workers interest in the sideline,” it said.
It said the Aquino government should face the question of unemployment and workers rights without conditions as workers and the labor forces that our country has, is the social section that ran our economy. “Workers’ rights and welfare is integral to our electoral struggle same as all sectors as part of the marginalized and neglected,” it said.
Anak Mindanao said it join synchronized Mindanao-wide protest on May 1 as its contribution to the cause. “Anak Mindanao and its members all over the country will join the workers in the streets to push for the alternatives and to condemn the crime against the working class by this capitalist and elitist government,” it said.
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