ANALYSIS

By Alejandro Lichauco

The Daily Tribune
10/23/2008

The hunger problem is now at the center stage of the national problem following survey reports that the hunger situation has sharply aggravated.

In his column of Oct. 21, titled Local Leaders should solve the hunger problem, Alejandro Roces of the Philippine Star urged the nation’s political leaders to do something about the problem. Roces alluded to the fact that the Philippines has been listed “as one of the 33 countries with a serious hunger problem along with troubled economies in Africa. He went on to cite that 11 million Filipinos “or about 12 percent of the population are food poor and live below the subsistence level.”

Truth is that the hunger situation is much worse than the statistics cited by Roces. Way back in 1986, immediately after Edsa, a survey commissioned by the office of then Speaker Mitra found that more than 40 percent of Filipino households are living in hunger conditions. And in 2003, a government agency found that 80 percent of Filipino households are hungry.

The global meltdown which has recently exploded with the financial explosion in Wall St. is bound to accentuate beyond calculation the hunger situation in the country and the wonder of wonders is that there isn’t a single politician or political leader in the horizon who has stepped forward with just as much of a suggestion as to what should be done.

The situation is made-to-order for the opposition but sadly there isn’t a single one of them who has come out with even as much of a hint as to what should be done. The deafening failure of the nation’s political parties and politicians to even suggest that Congress should now meet in emergency session just to discuss and focus on the hunger situation and the repercussions of the global meltdown on the Philippines is proof conclusive that the nation can’t rely on civilian authorities to respond to the humanitarian disaster that is going on right before our very eyes and nose.

Question is, if the country can’t rely on the civilian and political authorities, on whom can it rely to solve or at least attempt to solve the hunger problem?

The answer is, the military revolutionaries. Only the military revolutionaries, a faction of which goes appropriately enough by the name of the Bagong Katipunan. A few years ago, this group issued a Manifesto titled The Last Revolution: Toward a New Philippine Order. In that document, the revolutionary group traced the root of the hunger to globalization and a failed electoral system. Their proposed solution: Suspend elections, reorganize the electoral machinery and put an end to globalization.

“Globalization must be stopped,” the revolutionary manifesto declared and, it continued, “it cannot be stopped by a regime that had been reduced to a mere lap dog by multinational financial institutions.” The military revolutionaries described globalization as a “masked evil.”

Raising the issue of hunger — and mind you that was several years ago when politicians didn’t even mention the word — the Manifesto starkly stated that “Our people are literally dying of hunger in the countryside.”’ It continued: “Our society is slowly being engulfed by the fires of poverty, war and corruption.”

The military revolutionaries, mind you, issued that statement years before the global meltdown and years before this very government finally acknowledged that hunger — and even starvation — now stalks the countryside.

What is this piece trying to say? This piece is trying to say that the only organized faction in Philippine society that has displayed the foresight and concern over the problem of hunger are the military revolutionaries. Their Manifesto on the “Last Revolution” and call for a “New Philippine Order” alone are indications enough that they are the elements in our society qualified to take political leadership of the nation in these times.

The behavior pattern of the nation’s political leaders tell us only one thing: That it is utterly futile to look to politicians and the political system to address the humanitarian disaster that has the nation in grip and which threatens to tighten that grip even more in the immediate years ahead.

As one re-reads the Manifesto of the military revolutionaries today, one can only be overwhelmingly impressed by the patriotic concern and foresight that the group displayed and this writer will hazard to say that as the hunger pangs become more acute and as the people become increasingly aware, as they are bound to, that the nation now stands in urgent need of class of leaders that offer the prospect of leading the nation out of its hunger, the realization will dawn that the only political solution to the hunger crisis is a revolutionary military government composed of the best and the brightest in the Armed Forces.

The Third World abounds with examples of how military governments led by the patriotic likes of Nasser, Park Chung-hee, Suharto and Khadaffy took political hold of starving nations and delivered their peoples from poverty and hunger.

So, let’s all look to that. We need the new Bonifacios and they can be found only, it seems, in the idealistic and still uncorrupted elements of the Armed Forces of the Philippines.