by Alex Roldan
The problem of widespread poverty, as always, dominates all other concerns for any political administration in this country. Finding the solution has proven to be more complex than just simply providing ephemeral solutions such as “pantawid” programs that will only obscure reality. Worse, the fight over the issue of direct intervention to control population growth has been reduced to a morality issue when in fact widespread poverty is the real culprit! Meaning, the population issue cannot and can never be dissociated with the word that causes it, poverty.
New thoughts are starting to emerge about poverty as an issue. Maybe they have run out of solutions that they are now attempting to invent new arguments to justify why most efforts to alleviate poverty have failed. They argue that poverty is not to be solved but rather a necessity of the world! Poverty to them is a necessary outcome to balance the distribution of limited resources and solving it would just increase the consumption as people rise from that condition. Meaning, we need poverty! This is an interesting theory but crude.
Let me bring you to the arguments that are starting to drift in the minds of even known technocrats and intellectuals in the country today. I refuse to name them but they are just around.
The dominating argument is that, “as people rise from poverty, consumption increases,” and therefore the volume of output required will increase. It clearly refers to the concern that “productivity ratio” cannot keep up with the increase in “required volume output.”
There may be some weight to this line. But it is not right to simply compute the volume of output required by calculating the output consumed by each person and the number of people. It is indeed a frightening scenario but cannot and will never happen.
There may be some truth to the notion that as productivity ratio increases the consumption per person would also increase. But, this is not what is happening in reality. The frightening scenario is effectively counterbalanced by the reduced population growth. Hold your horses! I know what’s on your mind – that I am introducing a wild idea. But, I am not.
It is well documented that as the condition of the people in a country improves, population growth declines. Singapore is the nearest example. For several years now, Singapore is experiencing negative population growth. Their effort to encourage the population to have more children thru incentives such as government support and tax breaks doesn’t seem to work. But this was not the case in the early 60’s. Apprehensive due to very limited resources, they attempted several times to rein in their fast growing population, but failed. As their government’s policy changed to increasing productivity of the people, population growth without intervention started to decline!
This is basically what the Philippines and other developing countries are trying to capitalize on to improve their sagging economies – by sending surplus workforce to countries with declining general population growth.
In fact, it is accurate to conclude that population growth is the best indicator of the effectiveness of a country’s strategies in addressing poverty!
But how about the rules of supply and demand, and what are its effect on consumption? Will this not put pressure to maintain poverty as more people are capable of increased consumption?
Improvement of the poverty situation in a country as proven many times has the power to stabilize population growth. Once the population growth becomes stable, the natural consequence is stabilized consumption levels. Meaning, you cannot consume more than you can afford or require. So does the production output. As productivity ratio per person increases, the output consumption also increases, but only at a level that the population needs.
There is no truth that once you solve poverty, you stretch the country’s resources. As people grow richer, the lesser the mouths to feed. Then the excess volume output would just transfer to the increasing consumption of those who start to rise from poverty. It is the law of nature, isn’t it?
For comments, e-mail to rolandalex@yahoo.com
