Focus on food, vaccine, Recto urges economic managers

MANILA, Philippines — The Duterte administration must immediately focus on ensuring food supply and rolling out COVID-19 vaccinations if it wants the country’s economy to recover fast from the pandemic-induced recession, Senate President Pro Tempore Ralph Recto said yesterday.

The economy plunged to its lowest last year since 1946 when government first started coming out with the data, contracting by 9.5 percent. On the production side, agriculture, industry and services all suffered declines.

On the expenditure side, only government spending grew as consumer spending, investments, exports and imports fell.

“First, focus on food. If the GDP report card is bad, the GNP – the number of Gutom na Pilipino (hungry Filipinos) – is worse. There should be a review of the farm-to-table chain. Every step, and not just focus on the narrative ‘kasalanan ng (fault of the) middleman’,” Recto said in a statement.

He said food security is important as Filipino families on the average spend 43 percent of their income on food. But the bottom 30 percent, or about 7.42 million families, allot almost 60 percent of their income on food.

“If the daily minimum wage won’t be enough to buy a pot of chicken tinola (soup), then hunger becomes COVID’s deadliest side effect,” the senator said.

He said many of the country’s food woes are upstream, like production, and not just overpricing.

He said the government must also step on the gas on vaccine procurement as “joblessness is a result of jab-lessness.”

“Vaccination injects the people with immunity and it injects the economy with vitality. Drop in consumption led to income loss of about P1.05 trillion last year, 15 percent of which, or P150 billion, is our projected vaccination bill,” Recto said.

The government should also take advantage of the good weather window until mid-June to boost construction and agriculture as well as domestic tourism, provided protocols are “in place for people who would like to take a leave from Netflix to safely enjoy the outdoors.”

“Government should turn the entire country into a beehive of construction this summer – a physically distant, protocol compliant outdoor activity that can employ many. Begin with health facilities. Build while the sun is up, before the rains come and the typhoons do damage,” he said.

Cruel, insensitive

Sen. Grace Poe meanwhile asked administration officials to address the problem on unemployment if it intends to gear the economy toward arecovery instead of luring children to go out of their homes.

“They’ve been telling people to go out and spend to prop up the economy. But before they can spend, they need to have the money to do so. Allowing kids to go out doesn’t address that problem,” said Poe, a child welfare advocate.

“If economic planners are looking at consumer spending as the key to economic recovery, what they need to address is how people will have money to spend. I am no economist but they seem to be ‘hyperfocusing’ on boosting consumer spending as if it was a just a simple solution,” she said.

“It’s cruel and insensitive to tell the people to go out and spend if they already lost their jobs and prices are high, especially food,” she said.

Economists and businessmen have been calling for a stronger fiscal stimulus since last year to prevent the closure of companies and loss of jobs, but the administration seems to refuse to heed such calls, she said.

She stressed the government must learn to listen to all stakeholders. Filipinos have withstood one of the longest quarantine restrictions in the world. Government’s special amelioration was only provided during the strictest lockdown, or the two months of the enhanced community quarantine, she said.