Population bill a big waste–think tank
Michelle Remo
Philippine Daily Inquirer
MANILA, Philippines—A bill seeking to impose population control in the country would lead to a waste of valuable resources that would be better ploughed into education and infrastructure, a conservative think-tank said Thursday.
The proposed law, the Reproductive Health bill, or House bill No. 5043, comes at a time when countries that adopted similar policies in the 1970s were reversing them as they started to worry about supporting their ageing populations, said economists at the University of Asia and the Pacific, a Catholic school in Pasig City founded by Opus Dei members.
The school’s chief economist Bernardo Villegas said controlling the population would be “demographic suicide,” and would put the blame for widespread poverty in the country with “people who are not yet even born.”
“I agree that mass poverty is the biggest scandal in the Philippines. [But] there is no strong empirical evidence in my field, which is economic science, that shows population growth is responsible for mass poverty,” Villegas told a press briefing Thursday.
Villegas said that one of the biggest fallacies ever told was that the bigger the family, the poorer it was.
“The ultimate resource of the planet is the human being. Population growth can actually be a tool for eradicating poverty,” Villegas said.
Potential veto
The bill is about 12 votes shy of passing in the House of Representatives, according to its principal author, Albay Rep. Edcel Lagman.
However, it lacks the support of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, a devout Roman Catholic who could theoretically veto it even if passed by the House and the Senate. Lagman said a dozen previous population bills over the past generation had been defeated.
The dominant Catholic Church has threatened to excommunicate legislators who vote for the bill.
Under the proposed law, the state would have to fund a population program, teach it at schools and to couples intending to marry, and have government hospitals offer contraceptives, vasectomies and tubal ligations, an operation that blocks the fallopian tubes.
Singapore as example
It would require the state to “encourage two children as the ideal family size.”
The Philippines has one of the highest birth rates in Asia, with the population growing at around two percent annually and expected to top 100 million in five years.
Villegas noted that government data showed that population density did not have a direct relation to poverty.
He said that Singapore had 7,223 persons for every square kilometer, while the Philippines had only 255. Although population density in Singapore was much higher, it’s per capita gross national income was way better at $21,230 compared with the Philippines’ $1,081.
Comparing data on regions within the country, Villegas said the National Capital Region had 15,617 people for every square kilometer, much higher than that of any other region in the country. The Eastern Visayas Region, for instance, only had 173 people per square kilometer.
But despite that, the NCR was still identified as the richest region in the Philippines, with a real per capita income of P32,219. Per capita in Eastern Visayas was recorded only at P6,708.
With a report from Agence France-Presse
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