WHY ARE FILIPINOS SO POOR?

August 26, 2011 at 4:51 PM

This essay below delivered in a speech by Pinoy writer F. Sionel Jose probably explains why as Our
Beloved the Philippines has been on a decline since the 1950s.

Why are Filipinos so Poor?

In the ’50s and ’60s, the Philippines was the most envied country in Southeast Asia. What happened?

By F. Sionil Jose

What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor – but look at Korea now. In
the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-
roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle
and rubber plantations. Bangkok was criss-crossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun,
the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city’s skyline. Ricefields all the way from Don Muang airport
— then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument.Visit these cities today
and weep — for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila

In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that
when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared with the
hundreds of Ph.D.’s that were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic
explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products.

The basic question really is why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to
poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed
that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue
schooling.Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have
been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our
economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day.But this physical
poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit.

Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, came to
the Philippines and wrote about our damaged culture which, he asserted, impeded our development.
Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis.This is not to say that I blame
our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an
elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one’s
hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be
what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite.