MANILA (Mindanao Examiner / June 12, 2013) – A Filipino youth group Anakbayan criticized the Aquino administration for making up excuses for the rise in number of the unemployed saying it was the result of deliberate neglect.
It said despite news of record-breaking performances in the stock market and credit rating upgrades, the National Economic and Development Authority or NEDA announced that the unemployment rate rose to 7.5% in the first quarter of the year, the highest under President Benigno Aquino.
However, NEDA blamed extreme weather conditions for the increase in joblessness.
“For decades, the agricultural sector has been chronically stunted. Any effects caused by adverse weather conditions merely worsened the situation. It is wrong to blame the poor state of agriculture on the latter alone,” Vencer Crisostomo, Anakbayan national chairperson, said in a statement sent to the regional newspaper Mindanao Examiner.
“The root of the problem is that the current and previous administrations made our economy export-oriented. Instead of modernizing our agricultural sector to achieve food independence and provide a base for developing our local industries, it has been reduced to a mere provider of food products for foreign supermarkets and tables,” he said.
Crisostomo said that under Aquino, the interrelated fields of labor export and business process outsourcing are aggressively pushed while programs for agricultural modernization, such as genuine agrarian reform, ending of cheap agricultural imports, and sufficient funding of support services such as irrigation, have been ignored.
“The few farmers lucky enough to own the land they are tilling become more vulnerable to changes in the weather because of the lack of State support. For example, those without access to irrigation are at the mercy of whether it rains regularly or not. Even if they manage to successfully harvest their crops, they then have to contend with cheaper imports being dumped in the Philippines. What is Aquino doing about this?” he asked.
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