A MEMBER of the Makabayan Bloc in the House of Representatives rejected on Monday a proposed measure institutionalizing the government dole program, dubbed the Conditional Cash Transfer, saying it will only promote mendicancy if it is enacted into law.
Gabriela Rep. Emmi de Jesus was referring to House Bill 154, which was approved by the House committee appropriations, chaired by Davao City Rep. Isidro Ungab and endorsed for plenary reconsideration last December.
“With all the unresolved problems uncovered by the Commission on Audit of double listings and ghost beneficiaries for the CCT, and the scandalous spending of Modified CCT funds to hide street families from foreign visitors, the Appropriations Committee should have thought of the welfare of taxpayers who will pay the gigantic debt to fund this program that is useless in its goal of solving poverty,” De Jesus protested.
The bill, authored by Tarlac Rep. Susan Yap, seeks “to provide assistance to the poor, break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, promote gender equality, achieve universal primary education, reduce child mortality and improve maternal health, which are also the part of the government’s Millennium Development Goals.”
In defending her bill, Yap noted that a total of 3,967,517 households from 143 cities, 1,484 municipalities in 79 provinces have benefited from the 4Ps Program since its implementation in March 2013.
But De Jesus said the bill bestows upon the Department of Social Welfare and Development the already controversial power to qualify CCT beneficiaries based on a targeting system already slammed by critics as politicized and blind to deeper social problems.
“Expanding the range of benefits to include high school fees and indigent senior pensions makes the poor increasingly dependent on CCT instead of addressing chronic joblessness that creates poverty in the first place,” de Jesus said.
“Despite the huge budget for the CCT program, the goal to halve poverty incidence from 34.4 percent in 1991 to 17.2 percent 2015, the Aquino administration’s touted inclusive growth achieved only 24.9 percent compared to the 25.2 percent in 2012,” De Jesus added.
De Jesus noted “the United Nation’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific found that among 16 Asia-Pacific economies, the Philippines has one of the worst performance in reducing poverty.”
This developed as De Jesus challenged candidates running for the 2016 elections to push for the abolition of the CCT and re-channel massive budget allocations instead to raising employment programs.
De Jesus cited the examples of Thailand and Vietnam that reduced poverty significantly by building farm infrastructure and boosting the agricultural sector in providing jobs and incomes while creating surplus stocks of grains that they now sell to food-insecure Philippines.
“The Ibon Foundation conservatively estimates interest payments to the World Bank for the CCT program could reach $94.6 million and $107.4 million for Asian Development Bank.
“For every $4 borrowed by the government to help finance the CCT, the country will need to pay $1 as interest,” De Jesus said.
