From the sixties and for three decades the economies that went into export mode were the economies that shot forward economically namely, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, and even Hong Kong and Singapore. We went into import substitution trying to protect our small manufacturing sector. Now that we have removed that restraint we find we are in no position to compete with giant China in manufactured goods. In fact our manufacturing sector has died except for electronics. But we need to export in order to balance our heavy importation of petroleum products and machinery. At present our only exports are high value agricultural products like bananas and pineapple.

But come to think of it our biggest export has been our people who have been shoring up our economy with their $18 billion in remittances. But also come to think of the social cost this has entailed. Children have grown up without their father or worse without their mother. How many broken families have resulted because of this separation? As someone commented: would it not be better to export our natural resources rather than our most valuable asset namely our people? We have destroyed our forests and nothing is left of it. We still have our mines. What is the gold and copper doing in our mountains when our people are going hungry? There will always be people who will carp at the cost to the environment from mining. There will always be costs. We have to decide on our priorities. Is hunger of a quarter of our people not a priority above the environmental costs? The costs must be reasonable. But there will be costs. We cannot have our cake and eat it too.

There must be discipline and control. Every plane landing is a controlled crash. Without the pilot to control the landing it will be a crash that we do not want. Control and discipline in harvesting our natural resources is necessary but we cannot avoid paying some cost. There is a price to feeding our people and emerging as a viable economy with a majority of our people in the middle class. My definition of the middle class is for a family that can pay for its health bills and can send their children to school up to finishing college. Right now only 14% of our children reach college.

We have less than a hundred universities while India has over 5,000. Our health system is good but the bottom quarter of our people cannot or have not seen a health professional in the past ten years. A rough estimate is that 20% of our people are well off, 30% middle class, and 50% are poor or those who do not have sufficient food, health care, or educational opportunities.

The US probably has 10% rich, 80% middle class, and 10% poor. That may still not be ideal but it is target we should aim for. They may have greater natural resources but we have sufficient natural resource.

They may have sufficiently developed human resources but we also can have enough intellectual opportunities for the majority of our people if we set our minds to get it. We have a people very conscious of the need for schooling so that the parents make all sorts of sacrifices for their children.

All we need is a little more effort to share and cooperate to make this people a really fully developed people. We can blame the politicians but we are also to blame. But blaming gets us nowhere. We have to do today the little that we can for love of God and country and neighbor. It just so happens that this is the country we have been given. We have to make the most of it. We complain and we can complain all we want but it is only by doing something today that will move us forward to become the country and the economy we wish to have. We just have to ignore the carpers and the promoter of the ideal but do nothing about it. It is time to get down to work, to cooperate, and to rejoice with what we have done. <emeterio_barcelon@yahoo.com>