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03/23/2006
Its the Environment, stupid.
Tongue-in-cheek, Lory Tan forwarded an article announcing publication of the report, “World Resoures 2005: The Wealth of the Poor: Managing Ecosystems to Fight Poverty”.
Lory should forward this to the GMA government. Not that I’m calling them stupid, I refrain from that with great difficulty. I’m just quoting Clinton’s sous-entendu to George Bush senior during a pre-electoral debate in which Bush seemed to have missed the point altogether and subsequently lost the election. However, the fact remains that the environment is not a priority for either government.
The report “stresses the urgent need to look beyond aid projects, debt relief and trade reform and focus on local natural resources to address the crisis of poverty in all parts of the globe.” It then goes on to chide environmental organizations for ignoring development and developmental organizations for ignoring the environment. Perhaps they’re only speaking for themselves?
Anyone with any clear perspective and who has worked in developing countries will see that poverty and environmental degradation are interdependent. This is never more evident than in the Philippine context where more than 40 million Filipinos live on coastal areas and rely on fish for sustenance and livelihood. Poverty in coastal communities is chronic and we have depleted 90% of our fish stock over the past 60 years. Any connection?
Personally, my training is corporate and not having worked in development as long as most of the WWF staff, I am a bit shocked that this insight emerges only now in an official document. Am I missing something here?
I don’t think so, I think they’re missing something and have been for a long time. We have been an ‘underdeveloped’ country for 60 years now and nothing is more stark to us than the link between environmental degradation and poverty.
The article then quotes the World Bank, “"We need to stop thinking of the environment as a passive element. It is a fundamental part of community-based decision making. Unfortunately, the poor often lack legal rights to ecosystems and are excluded from decisions about ecosystem management. Without addressing these failures through changes in governance, there is little chance of using the economic potential of ecosystems to reduce rural poverty."
Eureka! This is deep insight. Which sinner thought the environment was a ‘passive element’? Haven’t these people ever worked with Third World organizations on Third World projects?
It gets better: “Community stewardship of local resources should be a critical element of any poverty-reduction model.” This is from UNDP now. “With greater income from the environment – call it ‘environmental income’ – poor families experience better nutrition and health and they begin to accumulate wealth. In other words, they begin the journey out of poverty.”
Thank you, Olav. Now we can begin working for environmental development after the course in Poverty Reduction 101.
Reality is that most environmental and developmental NGOs understand this and projects are implemented on this premise. On of the problems is that funding proposals submitted to international agencies must be aligned to themes dictated by the agency’s current direction: “You need funds for poverty reduction projects, is this livelihood or micro-financing? Oh... it’s a marine resource conservation project. Well, sorry, we are focusing on poverty reduction this year.”
Most frustrating is that we have the laws to support ‘community stewardship of local resources’ which is the spirit behind our local government code. But the governance required for implementation is lacking and falls so short of this spirit. As for local community tenure and rights to natural resources, let’s not even go there. Makes me think of the distinction made between a planner and a searcher. Planners have plans that they believe must be followed, have all the answers and often ignore realities on the ground. Searchers rely on baseline data, adaptation and flexibility to address the problems they unearth in their search. We rely too much on the planners for national policy. I’m happy to discover that the poverty-reduction planners now realize what the environmental and developmental searchers, meaning NGOs, knew all along, at least in the Philippines.
But let’s look at the bright side of things. Now that its ‘official’ that poverty and the state of the environment are interdependent, maybe our government will sit up, take notice and finally make environment a priority instead of constantly selling our resources to the highest bidder. Maybe Lory should disseminate real news…
S. Roxas
01:18 Posted by in Sus Dev | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Sustainable Development