Home from the war

The government has ordered all 30,000 Filipinos out of Lebanon. When they’re all back home, what do we do with them?

It is painful to read reports that some of them think Lebanon, which is being pounded into rubble by the Israelis, still offers more livelihood opportunities and is safer than some parts of the Philippines.

The picture painted by the United Nations Development Program of the Asian employment situation isn’t pretty. In its Asia-Pacific Human Development Report 2006, the UNDP said unemployment is on the rise in the region, with women and young workers the hardest hit by "jobless growth."

While the region’s volume of trade has steadily increased in the past years, with the UNDP describing Asia-Pacific as the emerging "factory of the world," production has shifted to more technologically efficient – and less labor-intensive – systems. There are jobs in agriculture, but workers, especially the youth, want other livelihood opportunities.

While fewer jobs are being created, the workforce keeps growing. Business outsourcing and new service-oriented enterprises such as call centers could help absorb the growing workforce. But the declining quality of Philippine education and our loss of English proficiency have pulled down national competitiveness. India is cornering the call-center market.

Inefficiency in manufacturing technology and inadequate infrastructure are additional investment disincentives. China and India are soaking up foreign investments in the region and are accumulating massive trade surpluses with Asian countries.

The UNDP noted that Asia-Pacific is opening up to free trade faster than any other region in the world. But countries in the region are being affected in different ways, with the most competitive – China and India – enjoying robust economic growth and the laggards starting to suffer from being eased out by the competition.

We have felt the pain keenly in the textile and clothing industry following the lifting of international export quotas. China and India have flooded the world with their textiles and apparel. The UNDP report singled out the Philippines together with Nepal, Pakistan and Thailand as the hardest hit by sharp drops in textile and clothing exports to the two largest markets, the United States and the European Union. Philippine industry players should look at what Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam are doing right; the UNDP report said the three countries have withstood the shock of the lifting of the quotas.

Thailand at least is fighting to compete particularly in the agriculture sector. The Philippines, on the other hand, has turned from being a food exporter until 1994 to an importer, with the net food deficit still increasing. We could sell to China, whose food imports are also on the rise, but we have barely enough to feed our own people.

Cheap agricultural imports are flooding the region, and our farmers cannot compete. A visit to the supermarket will easily illustrate the problem: from rice to onions and coconut powder, imported items are being sold at prices that are often lower than local products of the same quality.

This is good news for most consumers but bad news for farmers and other food producers. National food security inevitably suffers when farms are left fallow because younger generations would rather work overseas as truck drivers.

With few jobs and not enough food in their own land, what awaits our workers returning from Lebanon?

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Nurses and other health professionals aren’t going to stay forever here, where they are badly needed; high-paying jobs await them around the world.

Yesterday the government announced that special training would be offered to turn the country’s domestic helpers into "super maids" with value-added skills for employment overseas.

But workers such as electricians and drivers may find the international job market becoming tighter as other developing countries send their workers overseas. I doubt if those electricians and drivers would want to do backbreaking work in farms for profits or wages that are but a tiny fraction of what they earned in the Middle East.

Approximately eight million Filipinos are now working overseas – a tenth of our population. Their remittances are invaluable to the economy, but even their contribution to growth may also slip if national competitiveness continues to decline.

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"Asia-Pacific has embraced globalization, but will globalization embrace the region’s poor?" the UNDP asked in its report, which will be unveiled later this month.

The UNDP is proposing an eight-point agenda for countries in the region to cope with the problems posed by globalization. These include investments in infrastructure, technical or tertiary education and research and development.

Foreign investment groups in the country have made similar proposals in the past years. How much improvement have we seen? In education alone, the quality continues to deteriorate at all levels. Almost every major infrastructure project has been mothballed or delayed by red tape or corruption scandals.

The UNDP is also pushing for renewed emphasis on agriculture and rural development. It suggests caution in opening up vulnerable markets in agriculture to unfettered global trade.

There are more detailed proposals on tariffs, taxation, exchange rates and trade negotiations, all of which seek to give the poorest countries breathing space to improve competitiveness before they open up completely to free trade.

The Philippines is not classified among the poorest countries. But the UNDP report is not the first to note that we are falling behind in competitiveness.

With fewer investments and a shrinking job market, we can continue sending our steadily growing workforce overseas. But our declining ability to compete in a tough global environment will one day soon affect even our army of migrant workers.

We cannot carry on in our usual merry way, unmindful of the stiff competition posed by our neighbors.

The declining competitiveness will compel an increasing number of Filipinos to look for jobs in the most dangerous places in the world. Our workers accept jobs that nobody wants and go to places where no one else wants to go. No government ban on deployment can stop them.