EDITORIAL - 100 million

The 100 millionth Filipino is expected to be born anytime tomorrow, Sunday, July 26. Whether or not the Philippines has the capability to determine who exactly that baby will be remains to be seen. What is important is we know such a milestone will occur so that, hopefully, we can put a finger on its implications.

The 100 millionth Filipino is an interesting fact, something that will become the topic of conversation for a while. We can get ourselves titillated, provided we get to know the precise details, by such trivia as to whether it will be a boy or a girl and what will be its name and to whose parents and in what place.

Or maybe we will never get to know the real answers, which is just as well, for our own sake and for the baby's, who might get hounded for the rest of its life by the fact. Besides, the real hard questions that lurk under the fact may not get the real hard answers they deserve as well.

For example, now that we've breached the 100 million threshold, is there a plan by government on how to deal with the fact that, at the current rate of three babies being born a minute in a country that has now hit the 100 millionth mark, we could make 200 million much faster than we did 100 million?

The United States, the country we most often look up to, has a population of only a little over 300 million, living in an area measuring almost 10,000,000 square kilometers. We, on the other hand, have 100 million packed into an area that is only 300,000 square kilometers.

What that means is that while the number of Filipinos is a whooping one third of all Americans, we live in an area that is more or less 30 times smaller than that where the Americans live. And at the rate we are going, we will soon be running out of real estate to stand on.

And we have not even dealt with the food we need to survive in order to keep on making more babies. Right now, we have become heavily dependent on rice imports to feed our people. And on whom do we largely rely on for our rice supply? Why, on the two most populous countries in the world, that who — China and India.

Eventually, China and India, both of which have more than a billion people each, will eventually need all the rice for their own needs and cannot export anymore. In fact, our problem with China in the South China Sea is as much about fish supplies as it is about oil deposits and territorial claims.

So while we find great interest in making 100 million, we should strive mightily to look at what that number means to our lives and our future. Right now, all that seems to preoccupy our leaders is politics. Maybe they should ponder for a while about what the politics of breaching 100 million means for their own interests.