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!