A story about our population and our lechon!

Today is Labor Day. With the still ongoing global financial crisis, if you have a job, be thankful to the Lord that you still have one. Others haven’t fared better than you, especially in the hardest hit areas of the United States. Let us thank our labor force, especially those abroad for helping the Philippine economy especially in these harsh financial times. I don’t know where the Philippines would be without them.

Here’s one very relevant report that seems to have been buried deep in the inside pages of the Manila Bulletin written by Genalyn Kabilin entitled “Large Population a Boon to Business—President Arroyo.” This is very true. Take the case of the islands of Guam, Saipan or Papua New Guinea or even Macau; they have very small populations that they had to take in Filipino workers to be paid higher than average salaries to make their economy grow. That’s because these islands are so sparsely populated.

The best example is China. When it reached the one billionth mark in their population, the Western countries told them to do a one-child policy as it is their huge population that caused their poverty. Well, that didn’t stop their population from growing. But when America realized that China had become the world’s largest market, they gave it a Most Favored Nation Status (MFN). What happened in China was, its Communist Politburo threw away the Stalinist/Maoist Communist way and embraced Capitalism, retaining only its Communism in its politics. Now take a good look at China today.

Thank God Pres. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo (GMA) understands this even with her economic mind. The problem in this country is not our population, but the kind of politics that sucks out taxpayer’s money into the pockets of the corrupt and the damned. We do not need a Reproductive Health (RH) bill to curtail our population growth. What we need is a new kind of politics that would tune this nation into having public servants that would truly serve the needs of our population and not the needs of politicians who arrogate unto themselves their political offices as if they had a Torrens Title to it.

Pres. Arroyo was in Cebu last Tuesday for the 75th Anniversary of the Cebu Archdiocese. I’m glad she made this newly-released statement. Perhaps now is the time for our good friend, Rep. Nerissa Soon-Ruiz to wake up to the present reality that she is backing the wrong horse in trying to promote the RH Bill! She shouldn’t have attended those church ceremonies.

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Cebu may have ranked as last in the top 20 list of the Best Cities in the Philippines to live by that never-heard local magazine dubbed MoneySense which used the survey results from the Philippine Cities Competitiveness Ranking Project (PCCRP) of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM). But the editor of that magazine Mr. Heinz Bulos (sounds like a German name) didn’t even realize that he should have compared apples with apples, like Metro Cebu vs. Metro Manila. In the end, he compared Cebu vs. the component cities of Metro Manila, like Pasig, Marikina or Muntinglupa. This report was totally unfair to Cebu as they are comparing apples with oranges.

Fortunately, that magazine doesn’t have a wide readership so only a few eyes saw it. However, while that may seem like bad news for Cebu, there is a great news that the whole of Asia and the entire Philippines have read in a front-page report that appeared in The Philippine Star last Wednesday that the Philippine lechon, specifically the lechon in Cebu made it to the “Best Pig” of Asia according to the article written by Lara Day entitled “Pork Art” in an interview she made with tv Chef Anthony Bourdain who has a tv culinary show dubbed “No Reservations”.

Of course, I immediately scrambled to get a copy of that Time Magazine with the front cover “100 Days of Obama.” The news item quoted the blog of Bourdain said, “of all the pigs he tasted all over the world, the slow roasted lechon he had in Cebu was the best.”

While the Time magazine article said, “It was just a matter of time before the world found out. You could call it the Platonic idea of a pig, but it’s doubtful if Plato, or even an entire faculty of philosophers, could have imagined anything so exquisite.” This is something that Filipinos have always known, that the Cebu lechon is the best lechon in the Philippines and now we’ve made it to the Best in Asia list.

You can say that there is good news in the midst of the scare of the Swine Flu that is swirling around the globe. The secret of Cebu has been uncovered. Now foreign tourists who come to the Philippines would now add lechon on their list of “things-to-do” during their visit here!