Government urged to hike budget for agri, environment, health, education

The Alternative Budget Initiative (ABI), a consortium of 60 non-government organizations which advocates best practices in budget, is urging the government to allocate more of its budget for the environment, agriculture, health and education to help stimulate the economy in the face of the current global economic slowdown.

According to ABI, the real fiscal stimuli are budget reforms and spending more for social development.

Boosting the economy means empowering the people by increasing allocations for social development and realigning vague and unreasonable budget items to spending for health, education, environment and agriculture, the ABI said. 

“The perfect fiscal stimuli are increased allocations for environment, agriculture, health and education which target the poorest segments of society. This will help create more jobs, increase competitiveness of Filipinos and promote sustainable environment and food security,” said Leonor Magtolis Briones, lead convenor of Social Watch Philippines which organized the ABI.

“Budget reforms are needed to erase the culture of corruption where majority of public funds are controlled by only one person through the special purpose funds (SPFs), unprogrammed funds, and the indiscriminate use of savings. This drags millions of Filipino families below the poverty line,” the former national treasurer added.

The ABI called on Sen. Edgardo Angara, chairman of the Senate finance committee, to adopt the people’s alternative budget proposal and follow the proposed alternative sources of funding.

The group identified alternative sources of funding for social development from appropriations in the National Expenditure Programs which have neither details nor special provisions on the use of funds and are subject to Presidential discretion. This includes the SPFs which accounts for more than half of the proposed budget for 2009.

In the alternative budget proposal, the group proposed an additional P34 billion allocation for social development which includes P18 billion for basic education; P537 million for higher education; P3.4 million for health; P9.6 billion for agriculture; and P2.6 billion for environment.