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.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
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.
.
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.
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.
.
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.
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