EDITORIAL - Development aid

The government naturally welcomed the $107.7-million aid program for the Philippines launched under the United Nations Development Assistance Framework. The program, which will run from 2005 to 2009, co-vers a broad range of activities, from the improvement of basic services to peace building and promotion of good government.

The administration must make sure this aid program does not go to waste. Since the people power revolt in 1986, there have been numerous foreign aid programs for the country. It’s easy to see how those aid programs fared. Aid donors complained that assistance was underutilized. Often the government failed to come up with counterpart funding for certain projects. Fo-reign-assisted projects were hampered by red tape, inefficiency, neglect and sheer lack of interest on the part of the government.

Aside from seeing to it that the UN aid is properly utilized, the government should also take note of the observations made by the UNDAF. The observations are not new to Filipinos: graft and corruption as well as intense politicking are hampering national deve-lopment, the UNDAF said. The country is susceptible to environmental damage. There is weak fiscal management. And failure to curb population growth has retarded development.

Even a key reason cited by the UNDAF for launching the development program is bad news: poverty incidence in the Philippines, the UN noted, is highest here than in any other country in Southeast Asia. That should be a wakeup call to a nation that only a few decades ago was one of the leading economies in the region. But then the nation has had numerous wakeup calls in the past years, with little effect. Right now the nation is in such dire straits, saddled with a trillion-peso debt and an enormous fiscal de-ficit, that it can use every help it can get.