Christmas is coming

The year is drawing to a close. The sticky heat of Manila makes it hard to imagine the snow that has fallen early in Britain, but Christmas is indeed coming. In Manila, as always, it has been coming for a long time. They say the Christmas festivities start in September - the first of the 'bers'. The well-groomed streets of the business district of Makati are ablaze with spectacular lights each evening. The malls are always crowded with a drifting sea of people enjoying the free air conditioning and the traffic is always impossible, but it is definitely intensifying. A week ago after an aborted attempt to escape for a weekend by air it took me an hour to get home from the airport and I live in Makati, just a stone's throw away.

If Christmas is coming, then the goose must be getting fat. I guess that means the goose is a banker in some global financial centre, though possibly not in Ireland.  He certainly isn't a small-holder farmer or landless farm labourer in  the Philippines, or one of those whose livelihoods depend on small-scale fishing, usually referred to here as 'fisherfolk', although I tend to baulk at the term because it is associated somehow in my mind with a religious folk music group I must have come across a long long time ago, which is something rather different from the people I am trying to write about now...

Economists say the rural poor are 'trapped' in the agriculture sector - two out of every three Filipinos, that is - which is precisely the sector which is not growing in economic terms. At a recent meeting at the Asian Development Bank, whose headquarters are conveniently situated here in Manila, a paper was presented that argued that you cannot 'leapfrog' straight from an agricultural economy to a service economy. The business process out-sourcing sector which has boomed in the Philippines in recent years only employs 350 000 people, which is a fraction of the workforce. No, there has to be an industrial phase.

My mind starts to wander as the meeting goes on and presentation follows presentation. I find myself comparing the Philippines to the UK. Both are archipelagoes stuck onto the edge of a big landmass. England used to be a nation of seafarers. Nowadays the Philippines has replaced it in that field, supplying a quarter of the world's merchant seamen, including, I have been told, five hundred in the dwindling Scottish fishing fleet. Both countries are heavily into the service based economy. In the UK that means the city slickers, in the Philippines that means call centres at home and trained labour to work overseas, in particular  nurses (78 000 of them in the British National Health Service). There are also an increasing number of less skilled women going to work as domestic servants in the Middle East. And there is the less desirable end of the service industry too. A recent study tells me there are more than a million prostitutes in the Philippines. That is a lot more than the number of people working in call centres. The same study tells me only 2% of them enjoy their work. I wonder why I don't find that statistic surprising...

When travelling in the field, or even just sitting at home or in the office, I find it difficult sometimes not to develop an apocalyptic vision of the network of tiny villages and communities spread all over this mountainous archipelago of seven thousand islands, all growing daily more populous, while the land becomes increasingly ravaged and the seas are despoiled of whatever small fish stocks yet remain. The small people are up against big timers involved in illegal logging and mining, and large fishing concerns with big boats. Mother nature is up against the whole lot of them. It is amazing how resilient she has been so far, but surely something must give in the end? One thing is for sure, there is a preponderance of under-nourishment. Unicef claims 40% of under-fives are malnourished in the Philippines. And this is not a war-torn forgotten corner of Africa, this is a middle income country in South East Asia. That in itself should be enough to inspire a Jeremiad.

As I spend longer here I tend to look increasingly to the geography - the mountains and islands thing - for the answer to my questions about why things haven't moved as perhaps the regional paradigm might expect. It took me a while to adjust to the Philippine concept of remoteness. Having worked previously in places like South Sudan, where remoteness literally means hundreds of miles of grassland and swamp between you and the nearest road, it seemed strange at first that places which look so close on the map - just a few miles up the hill or a boat ride across a narrow sea, but the mountains are steep and, often, unless there has been a logging operation at some time, there is not a road and little boats and little islands are just that, you cannot somehow 'modernise' them.

But then onto this geography you have to map something else, the system that defines how people live their lives, how their lives are governed and how resources are shared - all those things that tend to get bundled together under the increasingly trendy heading of 'political economy.' To plunge strraight into the deep end on this I recently read a paper which compared the political economy of the Philippines to the history of the Mafia's taking over of the entire infrastructure of governance in Southern Italy in the latter part of the 19th century and early part of the 20th. If we start with Marx's concept of 'Primitive Accumulation' with its basic thesis that the primitive capitalist accumulates wealth from a disempowered peasant class through processes of 'resource extraction, plunder, enslavement and forcible eviction', we can overlay onto it the historical process by which the hireling overseers of a viciously rent-seeking, absentee Spanish land-owning elite became in time the local land-owning powers themselves, able to capture an extremely fragmented political and administrative system, through systematically criminalising it, recurring not as a last, but all too often as a first resort, to violence and intimidation in order to secure their control over resources, with more than a hundred and twenty private armies around the country and a staggeringly high rate of what are known as 'extra-judicial killings', or in this acronym-loving country, where even the humble toilet is referred to as the 'CR', meaning 'comfort room', as 'EJK's, and above all through the deeply entrenched tradition of 'utang na loob', the debt which cannot be repaid that more or less defines the asymmetry at the heart of these relationships. The functioning of the latter is most obvious in the clientelism of local governance, where a mayor or congressman may enroll the poor in free health insurance schemes or build a basketball court for a village not on the basis of delivery of services to tax-paying citizens, but in exchange for a loyalty which is, of course, most blatantly demonstrated at election time. When I think back to one of my first field trips here down in Mindanao a little over three years ago, I remember being completely nonplussed when on arriving at the municipal office in one town I was told 'The mayor is not here, but you can meet his daughter.' At the time I could not for the life of me fathom why I should want to meet the mayor's daughter, but now, many field trips later, the reasoning is all too clear to me: the holding of public office locally equates to holding power in a very tangible way, and this power will usually be captured by one big family, so the office in question is in fact family business. Obviously, therefore, if the head of the family is not available then it might be just as well to meet another family member.

Of course the worst example of this 'family business' approach to governance and government, the one which really could have been scripted by Martin  Scorsese, has been that of the Ampatuan family in Maguindanao. Human Rights Watch recently published their annual report, which focused on the rise to power of the Ampatuans, aided and abetted by the former president, who allowed them to build up a formidable army of heavily armed  gangsters in return for delivering a 100% electoral result that was instrumental in ensuring her win in the 2004 presidential election. The Ampatuans cotrolled the governorship of the Autonomous Regional in Muslim Mindanao, the governorship of their home province of Maguindanao and every municipality within it. When old man Amapatuan needed another fiefdom for one of his numerous progeny, he would simply subdivide an existing municipality to make two out of one. Meanwhile, the population were kept in cowed subservience through a reign of terror whose sheer sadistic brutality makes for the sort of reading that keeps you awake at night. This is not a movie like 'Casino'; the chainsaw murders, torture, burials alive and rapes are all documented in horrifying detail as the daily reality of this miserable corner of the country, which, not surprisingly comes bottom of the heap on most poverty indicators.

I guess that on reading this sort of thing an instinctive reaction is to localise it, explain it through the circumstances, the local history, the culture, the psychology of the actual actors. But the uncomfortable fact is that there is plenty of evidence to tell us that there is something inside human nature that has meant that badder than bad things have happened almost everywhere at some time. Melvyn Bragg's 'In our Time' programme on Radio 4, which I occasionally listen to through the internet, featured a discussion of  Fox's 'Book of Martyrs' the other day. The particular account of a pregnant woman being burnt alive, giving birth during the process and the executioners or bystanders then tossing the newly born baby onto the fire with her, still sticks in my mind with traumatic, nightmare-inducing persistence. And that was something that happened - or at least things of that kind happened - back home, although I can comfort myself with the ever-lengthening expanse of time between then and the reality of my today. Thank goodness for all the development of human rights, rule of law and justice that seems to have happened since the days that Fox was writing about. At least in my neck of the woods..but not everywhere, as the Ampatuan story reminds me, and not in terms of a fundamental change in human nature, if I am to believe some of the horrific cases of abuse and murder of small children which crop up with sickening frequency in the UK news. Maybe human nature is fundamentally evil. If you dwell on it, it's enough to turn anyone into Ivan Karamazov.

I really do try not to dwell on the bad things too much, but sometimes they are too in your face to avoid. Yesterday I went to a meeting with the Secretary of Health and all the main partners in the health sector in a hotel in Melate. This is an area that should be the heart and soul of the metropolis, with the historical centre nearby in 'Intramuros' and the wonderful sweep of Manila Bay as its front door, but despite the presence of the huge American Embassy building there, it does not give the feeling of the live and healthy centre of a proud capital - that sense of prosperity and well-being is left for the rather soulless high rise offices of the Makati business district, from which beggars and street peddlars are excluded. In Melate the streets look as if they have been subjected to a bomb attack or earthquake. Higgledy piggledy shacks, deserted, half-finished or tumble-down buildings, with whole families sleeping out on the street, child beggars, seedy bars with their numerous touts crowding the broken sidewalks, all create the impression, especially at night, when garish lights abound, of the cityscapes of Bladerunner adapted to a tropical third-world context, especially as all this ramshackle seething mess is in fact punctuated with one or two big new skscrapers, mainly hotels and casinos, that blend in with about the same degree of naturalness as Raymond Chandler's famous tarantula on a piece of angel food.

My journey took me to one of these big new hotels. Stuck in traffic as we approached I looked out to see a ragged man seriously beating up a woman, whom he eventually picked up and dumped bodily into a rubbish cart, where he continued to beat her out-of-sight body as though he were determined to prevent her getting up or out. Eventually she raised her bruised and battered face over the side of the cart, for all the world like Bill Syke's wife shortly before he did away with her. By then we were leaving. I wanted to to get out in some swort of hopeless gesture, but my driver told me there was nothing we could do, the police would simply regard the matter as domestic violence and would only be willing to act if the woman complained. Everyone else drove on too. We were all just passing by.

By the time the meeting was over it was dark. We drove back through the traffic-clogged streets, illuminated more by the garish signs outside the bars and night clubs and the car headlights than by the street lights. A little girl came to beg at my car window, selling garlands of Sampuguita flowers. I felt uncomfortable and alienated from this creature from another world staring through the glass into my affluent aquarium. despite years of living in this environmnet, I still don't know how to react to beggars who come up to my car window. 'Girls like her are easy victims for the flesh trade,' said my driver as the lights changed and we drove on. A little further on, just before it started to rain, we were snarled in traffic next to where a ragged young woman sat on the pavement with her two tiny children. She was not begging, just sitting there listlessly. 'They should go back to the provinces,' said my driver. 'Why do they come to the city?'

It would be difficult to get through life if we spent all our time dwelling on these encounters and our own failure to do the right thing, if only we knew what it was. When I was a child my father would always comfort me by telling me all the bad things were in the past, the world had become and was becoming a better place - torture of prisonners in war, rape and sadistic killing of women caught up in conflict, human trafficking and enforced prostitution, al these things didn't happen any more. I can remember how terribly lonely I felt inside as the scales fell away from my eyes during my adolescent years and my increasing awareness of the real world showed me that all the bad things persist, bigger and better than ever before.

Now I read my Tristes Tropiques and find LS telling me that the hideous exploitation he saw in the Bengal of his day, when it was part of the British Empire, was a repetition of the slave based economies of the ancient world. And I think about what I saw in the Bangladesh where I spent three years before coming here. Every day I would watch from my balcony as the armies of brightly clad garment girls shuffled to and from the sweatshops. Their reality lies at the heart of the development conundrum. The employment they have in the sweatshops is fulfilling their aspirations of rising out of poverty. They traipse the weary miles through the sticky heat between the hideous boshtis where they live to the sweatshops where they work, because they cannot afford the transport fare. They save just a little, but it is enough to justify the move they have made, away from the certainty of early marriage or worse, it gives them status and value and a basis on which to build dreams of a better future, but they are actually on starvation wages which keep them alive but do not enable them to be properly nourished and as a consequence they are used up and finished at quite an early age, like a worse version of the lives of the mill girls in the Lancashire cotton towns in the days when Britain had a textile industry.

I have very few memories from the annual visits of my early childhood to my granny's house in Preston. The whole town reeked of the stench from the big Courtaulds' factory on its outskirts and there were still one or two working mills. I was once taken to peer inside through an open door. I just remember rows of machines and the most incredible noise. There was an old lady called Esther who used to visit my granny. She was almost stone deaf after a lifetime working on those noisy machines and her legs were deformed with rickets, which used to be a common, malnutrition-related condition. She used to shout at the television when she watched Coronation Street because she thought it was 'real'. At least that is what my granny and great aunts Eva and Annie told me.

But I digress. What hope do we, sad fallen humanity that we are, have in the future, if we have turned the world into such a dark place? Once you left Eden you cannot go back, of course. The process of transformation of landscape, nature, livelihoods cannot be undone. And if we are to blame for that, at the same time there is a human solution to be found in all the people who are being positive and are doing things. Even the great and the good Dr Jeffrey Sachs has discovered the king of Bhutan's happiness index according to an article he has just published in the International Herald Tribune. I just wonder what it all adds up to and where we really think we are going. I sometimes wonder what happened to the science and science fiction-based optimism of the past, the glorious vision of the future that permeates Arthur C. Clarke's oeuvre or the episodes of Startrek. The model there is of a society where all the drudgery is taken care of by machines while a sensibly moderate, well educated human population live a wonderful, adventurous, rather middle class life in space, channelling their aggression into fighting aliens of varying degrees of physical and moral ugliness. In reality it seems it is easier to employ the teaming populations of the third world than to give the drudgery to machines. Maybe it is stupid to believe in Utopia instead of  dark satanic mills.

So I end up with this constant, harping aporia. Questions without answers. When macro-economics has the answers to development and poverty it always involves a reification of human beings that I find unacceptable. Now in the globalised, consumer world it might be better to talk of full-blown Adorno-style commodification. Everything and everyone is just a commodity in the end.

When Levi-Strauss traveled to S Asia, what he described was a hellish world based on large, exploited human populations in a long abused tropical landscape, which he contrasted with the much emptier less tainted expanses of the Matto Grosso in Brazil. Whether you look through the eyes of an ethnologist, an economist or anyone else for that matter, it seems to me  that the the standard macro-economist's model, by which the rural poor must be squeezed off their land to allow more profitable and supposedly productive  forms of agriculture to replace them, while they are supposed to become the new industrial working class, needs to be replaced. What I have seen over and over again in the developing world is huge and hideous shanty towns, where the rural poor become the new slum dwellers. I read somewhere there are one billion of them now. A billion Dick Whittingtons. Maybe we should give each one a lucky cat and tell them all to become seafarers like him! What we did back in England of course in the days before human rights activists could slow things down was to disposess the rural peasantry through the Enclosures Act, which fortuitously created the impoverished, malnourished and desperate workforce that was needed to get the industrial revolution going. And, apart from in moments of Christmas card, snowy rural scene nostalgia, we have never looked back.

Merry Christmas!

Indigenous People: Kabihug community in Camarines Norte

Last Wednesday as night gave way to day I stood on the balcony of my hotel in Bagasbas, Camarines Norte, watching the grey Pacific breakers under a heavy grey sky as the rain came driving in. It always feels disheartening when you are in a strange place, far from home, and the weather gives you a pounding. The people from the project had already texted to say it was going to be impossible to reach the community of indigenous people. My one day in the field after an eight hour drive the night before from Manila looked as if it was going to be spoilt.

So I texted back saying we'd go there anyway and get wet, like everybody else. And on the way the rain stopped and the hike up the hill was pretty short really with a pleasant little brook to wade across. The local representatives of the National Commission for Indigenous People were there ahead of us already cooking a meal for the community in a huge pot over a fire. Everything was fine. It usually works out like that.

I was down in Camarines Norte for the first time to visit a food security project which mainly focuses on supporting vulnerable lowland and upland farmers growing rice and pineapples, but also had a small component for the local indigenous community. In the afternoon I would be taking part in hand over cermonies for community irrigation schemes and the like, but I had asked to have the morning for the indigenous people.

The Kabihug are a small group, reckoned by Unicef in 2005 to have a total population of just 2,445 and described in the report of the Participatory Community Apppraisal conducted by Unicef in 2007 as 'living in a state of extreme deprivation with no access to proper housing, very little essential social services, and a discriminatory livelihood scheme based on an archaic land tenure system that violates basic rights.'

They are in fact a Negrito people, like the better known Aita and Dumagat, the forest dwelling inhabitants of the Philippines who were displaced by the Austronesian migrations. As always the discrimination mentioned in the Unicef report is related to race and appearance. The Negrito peoples are dark skinned and have curly hair. To this should be added the impoverishment that came over the years with displacement from their original homes, destruction of the forest environment and ultimately, in Camarines Norte, to their reduction to a bottom of the heap livelihood as itinerant day labourers, paid in kind at harvest time and otherwise simply fed in return for their work. In an ironic way, therefore, their nomadic forest people way of life retained its nomadic nature but based on a livelihood strategy of moving around in search of work.

That was my starting point, my baseline, if you like, with a great deal of questioning as to whether the project would really work for them, given that it was really a mainstream farmers project with a small indigenous peoples component, rather than something designed specifically with the Kabihug community in mind.

Of course the hike up the hill to visit a community is not a great way to do much more than say hello and gain a brief impression. It beats staying in the office, but then so do most activities, but the viewpoint of the visiting bureaucrat, happy as a newborn lamb to frisk around the countryside free from the shackles of his or her desk, should be seasoned with a great big dollop of humility and a surfeit of circumspection.

Of course, you still get an impression and you interact and it all goes into the big melting pot of ideas and discussion, internal and external, that you carry around with you, and sometimes you can help fix problems or point out weaknesses. And sometimes you can see some very good things that give you the grail-like warm glow...

And there is always an interesting feeling that comes when you are meeting a community on a grassy hilltop. Little by little they gather in the chosen place, while you sit and wait. And then you start to talk and I still have to remind myself after all these years that it is always a meeting of strangers and that they may be as curious about you as you are about them, so there is a lot of information to exchange before you can start ticking off the issues in your notebook. And I still also find it incredible how polite and receptive people are, willing to answer questions, discuss plans and ideas, explain the way they do things, tell you about themselves, their problems and their aspirations. as though you had a natural right to pry and probe.

I was happy with much of what I found on Wednesday morning. The children all had their school uniforms and were off down the hill to school, laughing and playing the way children should do, the people in the discussion group insisted they wanted to settle in this place now that it was their designated ancestral domain, twenty-three hectares of land for themselves, not the land of other farmers to work on for a pittance. The project is meant to help them get various crops started, including pineapples as a cash crop. I am not in a position to say whether it will work. There will be all kinds of problems and ups and downs, I am sure, but there is a chance that things will be better for the Kabihug than they have been in the past.

In all questions involving indigenous peoples the issue of land is fundamental. I have seen a wide variety of projects with different approaches regarding the various bits and pieces of technical input, but always the starting point must be the securing of land tenure by the community. There is nothing unusual in this, just as it is natural for a farmer to want to own his own land. The difference is that the concept of ownership is communal rather than individual and this has been a stumbling block in conceptual and legal terms all over the world. It has also been the basis for centuries of abuse and exploitation. In this sense, however over-complicated and fraught with all sorts of adminstrative and other problems it may be in practice, the Philippines' Indigenous Peoples' Rights Act of 1995, which incorporates the concept of ancestral domain and the granting of titles to communities, is a really important basic starting point.

The echoes in our own history are not difficult to find, if you consider the process of enclosing of common land in England, which took place over a prolonged period with many examples of ruthlessly suppressed resistance by the dispossessed peasantry, culminating in the 18th century in the Enclosures Act. A good Marxist would of course point immediately to the primitive accumulation that takes place in this process - resource extraction, plunder, enslavement and forcible eviction of the weak by the strong, human history as a reflection of a lot of what is nasty, selfish and greedy in human nature. In England of course peasant farmers were driven from their livelihoods, which depended on the availability of sufficient common land, to become either the exploited workforce of the new factories created by the industrial revolution or landless agricultural labourers of the kind that crop up on the fringes of Thomas Hardy's novels. It seems shameful somehow that we cannot do better than that in the 21st century.

Maybe we can. Granting Ancestral Domain titles is a start. Maybe also the REDD+ programme born out of our growing concern about climate change and the need to preserve forests wherever possible will also offer opportunities for indigenous communities to benefit from this concern for a global public good as the natural custodians of the forests where they live.

Back on the sea front at Bagasbas shortly before sundown, the sun was shining and the small group of surfers were out enjoying the waves. The province is hoping to grow its tourism based on the attractions of the place as a 'low-key', as the literature always puts it, surf resort. Other than that the main product of the province is pineapples -  I took three boxes of them back for colleagues in the office. They are sweet and delicious.

But back to the beach thing and tourism. The funny thing about these places in the Philippines is that they are always talking about their future potential, when they always have a sort of semi-derelict look about them as if they once were a great holiday destination but have now been left behind to live in their past, just like so many of the old seaside resorts in England that became nowhere places after the package holiday in Spain became the norm. There are one or two shack like bars along the sea front, one hideous derelict building which gives the whole row a melancholy air, a single halfway posh hotel that is half constructed at this time and a rather tired municipal garden. Flotsam and jetsam litter the beach of course. It is all ok if you, like me, want to get away from the noisy, crowded resorts, but it does have that slightly faded feeling, not a virgin beach, just a small, run down, wanton sort of place.

Other aspects of the province share this feature. The main road south through Bicol now bipasses Camarines Norte altogether, which is ironic in a way, since the Province opposed the renovation of the railways back in the 1970s precisely because the line did not go through its capital Daet. The province used to have an important fishing industry, but this has been decimated by over fishing and destructive practices, such as the use of coral-crushing trawl nets by big boats from outside the province. Once upon a time there was a major iron mine, but that shut down long ago. And then there is gold, but what remains is mined informally by small scale miners (with several hundred children possibly involved in child labour in very bad conditions). It's all in the past. Being a particular kind of Brit I have a liking for nostalgia tinged with melancholy. Catch me at the wrong moment and I am always inclined to say that things were somehow sweeter and better in my childhood than they are today - we had proper working villages where I grew up not the soulless dormitories that they have become today.

It's all piffle of course, just the reflections of a mood I sometimes get into. Meanwhile, I hope the surfing does take off in Bagasbas, just as I hope all the beneficiaries of the project I went to visit, lowland farmers, upland farmers and indigenous people alike, do well out of it.

Smooth seas and bumpy roads

Last Monday was a public holiday in the Philippines as in many other places. Around the streets where I live you would be forgiven for attributing the day off work to the celebration of Halloween, that strange product of the modern American fascination with the macabre that manifests itself in a super-abundance of witches, ghouls and trick-or-treating children. The affluent gated village where I live allows the children of domestic staff and their relatives to patrol the leafy streets collecting sweets and other treats door to door. It's all fun and good-natured and in-line with the country's American inheritance. The witches originated somewhere in Mitteleuropa I suspect, as German immigrants brought Walpurgisnacht with them to America. The name, on the other hand reflects what the long weekend holiday is really all about - 'hallow' being an old word for saint and Hallow e'en, being the Eve of All Saints' Day. On the 1st of November many Filipinos go to tend the graves of their relatives, often picnicking at the graveside in a manner highly reminiscent of the Day of the Dead in Mexico. And of course it is a fact that many of the foot soldiers securing Spanish rule in the colonial period originated in Mexico, bringing with them a number of Mexican traditions, including the humble camote or sweet potato that is now the staple food of extremely poor uplanders in many areas.

I could ramble on like this for a long time, but I'll stop. This was not intended to be a reflection on globalisation. I will just say I think it has been with us for a lot longer than some pundits seem to think.
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Anyway, I was lucky enough to spend my long weekend on a diving trip to Apo Reef, out in the middle of the sea half way between the islands of Mindoro and Coron. I am not a fanatical diver. I have learnt to dive three times in my life and dived for a short while simply because it was a convenient thing to do in the place I happened to be living. The Philippines is such a place. The other two were Mexico and Egypt. But Apo Reef is special. To begin with it takes a certain amount of planning and exertion to get there.

I will come back to the journey later.

The take off point for the reef is a beautiful little low key resort - Nipa houses, Indian Walnuts, mangroves, coconut palms, fireflies at night, nature rather than aircon -  on Pandan island just opposite the river mouth fishing port of Sablayan. The dive boat is an overgrown bangka, stabilised against the wind-blown waves by two flimsy looking outriggers, and you sleep on the deck under an awning, rising to wake the sharks that sleep in the sandy patches twenty metres down. The reef is quite extensive and behind it the sea is calm, the energy having been sucked out of the waves as they crash onto the wall of coral. The high mountains of Mindoro are still visible far away to the east, while the nearest small islands of the Coron group are just visible to the west. But nearby there are just two tiny coral islets where the reef stands high enough out of the water, one of them big enough to have a bit of a beach. They are a comforting feature of the seascape, though, a little bit of terra firma in a watery world to bear in mind as the waves rock you to sleep at night and the wind begins to freshen.

The first time I tried to get to Apo Reef was one of those epic failures. Arriving with a friend on the afternoon flight in San Jose airport with no clear idea of how to get to Pandan island, I found myself sitting three to a narrow metal bench in an overcrowded country bus setting off up the road just as the sun was setting. After a few kilometers the tarmac ran out, just as the rain began to fall. The road became an endless Gorgonzola of massive potholes and the rain turned into a furious and unrelenting tropical thunderstorm that became heavier and heavier as evening slipped into night. The bus crawled on, occasionally stopping so that the driver's assistant could go ahead to check that the next stretch was safe, especially at the various bridges over the rivers, swollen with rain water from the wall of mountains, invisible but menacing in the darkness, between which and the sea the road threaded its way, until at last we came to a grinding stop at a point where the bridge ahead was half swept away, the other half being blocked by a broken down truck. The driver bravely set off on an alternative route that took us into the mountains and eventually became so narrow that the bus was pushing its way through the jungle that overgrew what was by now little more than a track.

It was almost midnight by the time we reached Sablayan. The road was a river, filling the bus halfway up our shins and incidentally soaking all the clean clothes in my rucksack which I had foolishly placed on the floor. I stepped out into the pouring rain into the fast flowing flood and sank dramatically straight into a manhole. My friend, a calm, physically strong Aussie of the sort you ideally want to have around on such occasions -  grabbed me by the scruff of the neck as I went and pulled me up like a half-drowned rat. In the darkness I looked and in my ignorance of rural life was surprised to see a large number of passengers seated on the roof. It was hard, even in my sodden state, to imagine the misery of the journey they had been through.

Miraculously a 'tricycle', as the little motorcycle and sidecar taxis are called, sped up out of the darkness and after a few mutually unintelligible exchanges carried us down to the boat harbour at the river mouth, where, even more miraculously, we found a bangka captain who did not mind being woken up and asked to carry us across to Pandan in the rain. The engine fired up and we chugged out of the river mouth into the rough little stretch of storm tossed sea, across which, miraculously close, lay our destination. A light had been left on in the bar above the beach, guiding us like the light emanating from the Grail Chapel luring two Arthurian knights towards their destiny, in our case a welcome bottle of Tanduay rum.

Later I lay below the high nipa roof of my cabin watching the fireflies flash and glow above my head on the outside of my mosquito net and listening to the endless rain, safe and sound, but also well aware of the fact that I would not get to Apo reef that time around.

Last weekend, more than a year after that first trip and half a year after the elections, I found the road had if anything deteriorated. If you think I am making a mountain out of a molehill, I should point out that the coastal road from San Jose to Sablayan and beyond is the main road, in fact the only significant road in the entire province of Mindoro Occidental and this is not at the back end of beyond, like the Tawi Tawi archipelago a stone's throw away from Sabah. San Jose is a forty minute flight from Manila. Yet this one important bit of infrastructure remains all but unusable in bad weather and a slow, vehicle suspension-challenging pain in the derriere when the sun is shining. All along it, moreover, there are posters advertising its repair as a priority project of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, whose face framed by a builder's hard hat beams down from the billboards at the bruised and battered traveller.

Hang on a second, though! I thought she was the last president, who left office at the end of June. Don't they know about the election down here in Mindoro?

It is something to think about when even the most basic infrastructure, which the development pundits have so often reminded us, is a key ingredient for growth and development, is left unattended. Despite the comfortable news about growth projections for the economy published by the IMF and World Bank at frequent intervals, we are also told by UNICEF that 40% of all the children in the Philippines, more than 9 million in total, are growing up in poverty. Somehow one thing is not being converted into the other; economic growth is not delivering an end to poverty. And the roads are full of potholes.

Why is it like this? How does a country remain locked into this sort of elite-capture stasis? Of course there is the geography. This is not just a country of seven thousand islands, it is a country of seven thousand mountainous, volcanic islands, where remoteness is more a function of the terrain than it is of distance as the crow flies. In this landscape, for example, a pregnant woman in a mountain sitio has little chance of conforming to the government's plan  that she should give birth in a facility, meaning the barangay health station, even if that is only a few miles away, because those few miles are along a steep, slippery, muddy path, not a paved highway.

But this geography is also the backdrop and partial cause of a decentralisation of authority that is chaotic and politicised to an extent that the long term planning necessary for real sustainable development is repeatedly compromised by the political expediency of electioneering and local elites assume power dynastically within the bizarre framework of an Americanised political system, adopted with the same enthusiasm as Halloween, to rule their fiefdoms from generation unto generation. Some of the mayors and congressmen are enlightened, concerned to deliver services, promote development, improve governance. Others are warlords with private armies and mobsters to support them. It is all down to the tradition of the locality and the personality of the individual. And personality is the big thing, not policy, as the endless rows of grinning faces of would be local legislators that line the highways and byways of the country confirm.

The USA has just had its midterm elections, which we are informed were the most expensive ever with billions of dollars poured into brash, extravagant campaigns. Something like the approach to politics that underpins such a system prevails in the Philippines. A disproportionate amount of the national budget is diverted to the so-called special projects funds of congressmen, the so-called 'Pork Barrel'. The use of these funds to secure votes converts development into patronage. It makes it difficult to see through a solid health reform when so much funding for such things as enrolment of the poor into free health care, is dependent on the whim of a mayor or congressman or woman seeking re-election.

Meanwhile, even though surveys show that the vast majority of Filipinos, especially women who are too poor to pay for their own contraceptives or even after having ten children to obtain a tubal ligation, favour access to modern family planning, a small conservative elite in the Catholic Church has been able to block the passage of a reproductive health bill that would pave the way to making these services and commodities widely available. The fact is that the representatives of the people don't actually pay much attention to the wishes of the people, power stays in the hands of the few. The rest get tee shirts and other merchandise at election time. Now it seems with the new regime there is a glimmer of light at the end of this particular tunnel. The health reform will go forward, there is a commitment to universal health care and the reproductive health bill may get through the system and be passed into law. But it is worth remembering that even then, the extreme nature of decentralisation here means there is no guarantee that that will deliver full access for everyone. At the local level there will still be mayors and governors and barangay captains who will decide on their own priorities and will have their own views on what is right and what is wrong, just as they do already. Which means that from one municipality to the next everything can change. In one locality a woman from a poor farming village will find that not only can she have her babies in the relative security of a health station, but she can also take advantage of services that allow her and her husband to decide how many children they want to have. In the next municipality, there will be no access whatsoever to any form of contraceptives as the mayor curries favour with influential conservative clerics.

That's the way it is.

I'll stop here for today, but would just like to leave fellow development workers with the thought that whatever the gurus tell you, decentralisation is not a solution, it is simply a part of the landscape.

Informal Settlers

I spent yesterday on the road visiting people in informal settlements affected by typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng a year almost to the day after the disasters struck. The Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) coordinated by the World Bank in the latter part of last year concluded that the damage done by these two typhoons amounted to some 4.4 billion dollars or 2.7% of GDP. With regard to the victims, whose homes were inundated and in some cases washed away, it concluded that ' the vast majority of damage to housing stock was concentrated in the informal sector, so reconstruction means providing better alternatives for informal settlers', so I also wanted to meet representatives of the local authorities affected to see how things were going on that front. The vision that was painted at the PDNA meetings was of a golden opportunity to invest in medium rise, adequate accommodation in the urban context, giving people the chance of a decent life based on a place to live close to where they work. In the past, by contrast, the approach taken has always been to acquire some land out in the rural outer limits of the affected municipalities and set up single-room, semi-permanent housing in barrack like rows, to which the many unwanted squatterscan be moved from their makeshift shanties on stilts over the choked up waterways or outside the flood barriers on the shores of Lake Laguna. The fact that we are still funding NGO projects building those new homes in the middle of nowhere a year on after the disaster, while many of the victims of the typhoon are still living in tents at the edge of the construction sites, is already indicative of the fact that the bright new vision isn't materialising yet and that even the old-fashioned solution has been taking its time.

It is interesting to visit the palaces of local government on the same day that you visit shanty areas and the new camp-like settlement for the displaced. It does not have the same grotesque bathos as the displaced persons camps down in Maguindanao, where you can see pathetic rows of tent dwellings under the shadow of the palatial municipal palaces built for themselves by the Ampatuan family before the grizzly murder of some seventy female members of a rival family and accompanying journalists last year, just a month on from the typhoons in fact, led to their, possibly not so very permanent, demise. But you are in a different world from that of the shanty-dwellers. In the latter the first thing that strikes you is that everywhere there are children, hundreds and hundreds, splashing in the polluted waterways, sitting on their mothers' laps, quarrelling, playing, laughing, shouting crying, all around you. Women have ten, a community leader tells me, that's normal. Five is the minimum. I always feel a special unhappiness inside on these occasions, because to see children should be a cause for joy, always, but when I see this demographic supernova exploding around me in these cramped and miserable spaces, my thoughts are different - I see the problems these people face and the nightmare of the future their children may face and I wonder why it is so hard to make it easier for people to have smaller families as well as better lives in other ways. Which of course brings me back to the PDNA and its vision of a better urban environment for slum-dwellers emerging in the wake of the typhoons.

Talking to mayors and their staff tells a consistent story. Every local government is an island, doing its own thing in its own localised way to deal with the people they refer to as squatters who are now also known as Ondoy victims. Some mayors have in fact got the message on 'going high-rise' or 'densification' of human settlement, but they lack the financial wherewithal. As with other sectors, the responsibility is given to local government, while policy remains with the centre, or lost in a messy vortex of competing agencies, commissions and regulatory authorities, out of which new directives, acts of goverment, executive and administrative orders pour in their own bizarre, uncoordinated flood, while funding for the kind of large-scale transformation of the urban habitat is more like a dried-up river bed.

Up in the hills at the back end of Antipolo City, beyond where the surfaced road runs out lies the resettlement site of Pinugay, a sloping muddy field on the edge of a village, on which three or four stern rows of closely packed one-room dwellings, each with a shiny tin roof glinting in the sun that gathering rain clouds threaten to hide at any moment, line muddy unfinished roads. We sit down with a group of women in one of the tents where the people waiting to move into their houses once they have been completed have lived for months on end. When we ask her about how the experience of the flood and then this uprooting has affected her a young mother of five starts to cry. I try to imagine how it must be to go through what she has. She lived in an insecure slum, but had a job in a computer shop in comfortable Green Hills, a place where she could dream of a different future. Now she has been moved back into this landscape of rural poverty, while her husband is working on a construction site down in Cainta and can only come home at weekends.

So here she is in this big muddy camp in the middle of nowhere and I find I have nothing to say. If I have a lesson to learn it is the one I re-learn every time I go to the field, which is that if you listen toomuch to the macro-economists talking at meetings you start getting into that Marie-Antoinette way of thinking the meetings in nice hotels and offices always seem to induce. And it is easy in those meetings to find solutions to all the problems. But when you get out of the office and then out of the car or four wheel drive and start to walk a bit to where the people are who all the talking is about, then you realise you don't actually have much more to offer than your good intentions.

Back to Manila, a journey with Stephen Fry

I'm back in Manila in the wake of super-typhoon Juan, after a short holiday in Australia and New Zealand. I bought Stephen Fry's latest offering 'The Fry Chronicles' at Sydney airport during my three hour transfer walk-about there and it lasted me the length of the flight from there to Manila almost exactly. That's about seven hours with frequent interruptions. Nice work, Stephen!

I have to say it started well with echoes of 'Moab is my Washpot' that had me sniggering in suitably schoolboyish style as the plane took off. A steward serving me a glass of pretty not-bad Kiwi Cabernet Sauvignon shortly after take-off told me how much he had enjoyed seeing Stephen Fry's solo act in Sydney, so all the indicators were good at first. Unfortunately, once university high jinks and examination techniques gave way to professional luvvydom, the whole thing deteriorated into a boring concatenation of names of celebrity chums and various restaurants, clubs, shows and venues, punctuated by references to the huge amounts of easily earned cash that seem to gush like geysers in the media world, coupled with outbursts of self-loathing and public airing of angst. I am churlish enough to feel that the angst and self-loathing are not unconnected with the ease with which the oodles of oof seem to pour into the ample trouser pockets of Stephen and his chums, not least from their sorties into the magical realm of television advertising. The constant harping on about not really being the most talented of actors reflects this - you have to be pretty thick-skinned not to feel that somehow wealth ought to be the product of real effort or talent...or maybe not? There is a way in which the media crowd seem strangely similar to the wide-boys in the city whom they effect to despise. The only difference I can see is that the city types don't go in for champagne socialism - although, come to think of it, given the amount of money they have, they might even be able to repair their horrible image a little if they launched 'cityslicker-aid!' or 'speculator-relief'.

My most interesting encounter with Stephen's literary output occurred some ten years ago. It has continued to perplex me ever since. A Belgian friend at the time had just lent me Dumas' 'Count of Monte Cristo' in order to improve my French - which it did: Dumas is not difficult, I recommend it as a thoroughly good read for anyone wanting to brush up on their Gallic linguistic skills. Purely by coincidence the next book I read was Stephen Fry's 'The Stars' Tennis Balls'. Believe it or not the plot is an almost exact replica in every convoluted, revenge-soaked detail of Dumas' far longer novel. Except, of course that it is set in modern-day Britain, not post-Napoleonic France. I remember combing the blurb, the introduction, reviews, statements by the author, every possibly relevant source I could find, for some sort of acknowledgement that the book was a spoof or at least a copy or perhaps even written in homage to the great French author. But I found nothing. And to this day I have remained not exactly tortured but definitely in a 'wish-I-knew-for-sure' state of mind about Fry's undoubtedly very readable novel. Was it just an unconscious act of copying, or was it deliberate? and if it was the latter, then why did neither author nor publisher, nor indeed any of the reviewers or blurb-writers make any mention of the famous previous work? Of course it could be that none of them had read Dumas for a while. I guess not many people have time for that old foreign stuff. Besides, there have been several films...