Back to the countryside

Day or night, amid the enhanced community quarantine, the homeless roam city streets. Along Roxas Boulevard and Taft Avenue, children and adults alike beg from the few motorists who stop at red lights.

At night the homeless sleep in the bushes lining the northbound lane of the boulevard. They have tried sleeping along the southbound lane beside Manila Bay, which is surely breezier. But several times on my way home from the office late at night, I’ve chanced upon uniformed cops and possibly barangay personnel on motorcycles or in marked police vehicles leading the street people away from the bayfront area, toward the Cultural Center of the Philippines complex.

Wherever the homeless are being directed to go, I don’t think they are being taken into custody; there is simply no place to put them. And their numbers don’t seem to diminish in the daytime.

Even with the streets deserted and businesses closed, the homeless aren’t making any effort to leave the city. Despite the quarantine, there are individuals and groups that give out alms or regularly distribute food to the street dwellers. I’ve spotted vans of Indian organizations and the Asilo de San Vicente de Paul orphanage giving out cooked food in Styrofoam containers.

Religious groups and the schools they run, such as De la Salle University and College of Saint Benilde in Manila have also turned their facilities into shelters for the homeless, with physical distancing strictly enforced.

For their water needs, the homeless in the area have an abundance from a busted water main along A. Mabini street near the Manila Zoo. I think Maynilad Water has repaired it, but for the homeless, where’s there’s a will, there can be water.

Even in this crisis, and even with informal settlements being placed under “hard lockdown,” it’s doubtful that there will be an exodus of urban migrants in Metro Manila back to the countryside.

The pandemic is all over the country, and its impact on livelihoods is felt everywhere. Several local government executives outside the National Capital Region have urged even their residents stranded in the NCR not to return home yet, so I’m sure returning urban poor are even more unwelcome.

For the urban poor, the NCR still offers the best opportunities for eking out a living – plus the biggest number of organizations involved in charity work.

Any willingness to return to the countryside will be even weaker once the pandemic ends.

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Few people will dispute the rationale behind the latest effort to send urban migrants back to the provinces. Metro Manila is an unsustainable megacity, with congestion in certain areas approaching the levels we are seeing in our jails.

The countryside also deserves more aggressive development. Agriculture, micro agribusiness and tourism (yes, it will bounce back) are just among the sectors that can offer gainful employment and livelihood opportunities on site.

But job prospects aren’t the only things fueling urban migration. Especially for the youth, the experience of living in a developed urban center is a major lure. The cities have the shopping malls, major schools, nightspots and entertainment centers, and (most important for the youth) Wi-Fi connectivity.

You will need attractive incentives, such as the certainty of sustainable bigger earnings – or the kind of iron-fist governance that is possible only in places such as China – to persuade urban migrants to return to the countryside.

Such efforts have been undertaken by several presidents, but not even the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos could do it.

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Which is not to say that programs such as the Balik Probinsiya can’t be viable.

With sufficient resources and support from both the government and private sector, pilot areas can be selected to serve as models for countryside development. Communities can be turned into something like the farming areas of Chiang Mai in Thailand. The dairy industries of Laguna and Nueva Ecija can be expanded, and the centers can even be turned into tourism hubs.

More agricultural schools can be set up in the rural centers, to encourage students to stay home and think local when considering career options.

Before the pandemic, the Department of Tourism had been trying to promote agri-tourism. This could entice urban migrants to return to their home provinces.

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The government seems to realize that reversing urban migration is so challenging that Balik Probinsiya has to be voluntary.

Apart from the issues cited above, there are at least two other major issues that can complicate the program. One is the presence of threat groups at proposed relocation areas. People eking out a living from the soil can find themselves caught between skirmishing rebels and government forces. New People’s Army rebels collect “contributions” even from poor farmers in the countryside, and employ violence against those believed to be “collaborating” with the military.

In the south, the security problem is even worse, with Abu Sayyaf and other Islamist extremists sowing terror. Basilan, Sulu and Tawi-Tawi have good potential for tourism, agriculture and fisheries, but the security problem prevents these activities from bringing prosperity to the provinces.

The other problem for Balik Probinsiya is political will. The target of the program is the urban poor, and the biggest coddlers of informal settlers are local government and barangay officials themselves.

Political dynasties have been built on patronage doled out to vote-rich slums. In the city of Manila, no mayor has dared touch the squatters in Intramuros to turn the Walled City into a tourism center.

Surigao del Norte Rep. Robert Ace Barbers now has a proposal to limit every barangay to just 15,000 people. But the proposal, which arose from the sight of crowds unable to observe physical distancing while waiting for their COVID cash aid, needs to be finessed.

Facing “The Chiefs” the other night on Cignal TV’s One News, Barbers explained that it did not necessarily mean that people have to move out of their barangays.  Instead, each set of barangay officials would have jurisdiction over only 15,000 people – meaning one barangay could be broken up into smaller units.

So it’s not really for decongestion, but to bring efficiency to aid distribution during emergencies as well as the delivery of basic services.

Will it mean having more barangay personnel? Considering the mess the village officials have made of the COVID aid distribution, I don’t see the point.

Trying to promote a return to the countryside is a good idea. Implementing it, however, is a long-term effort that must be sustained through leadership changes.