With this new “soft lockdown” in the Cordillera, everybody is going hungry. Relief packs, none, as far as the big majority of the people are concerned. During the hard lockdown last year, at least, there were rice, sardines and noodles being distributed by the barangay officials. Now, we don’t hear of any.
Well, we were told to plant some vegetables, even if just on flower pots. Would those on flower pots be enough? Perhaps for a meal or two. Nothing more.
In the cities, 99% of the people don’t have even just a row to hoe. So planting for your own food, is way off the mark as a solution.
When people are going hungry, it will not be long before social chaos will ensue. Before that can happen, the restrictions on people’s movements would be eased a little bit. And they would be mollified as they would busy themselves trying to pick up the pieces of their lives and to make a living.
The question we now have to face, as we will keep on facing if we will be having more pandemics in the near future due to climate change, is how to redistribute the resources in the country. Where are our resources? They are in the pockets of the oligarchs and the corrupt politicians. How can those be redistributed without a revolution is beyond most of us.
The usual means of doing that is through taxation. For its effects, however, to trickle down to us would take forever. And our beloved country is using taxation to further enrich the oligarchs. A measure which is about to be legislated and implemented is to reduce the income taxes of corporations or big companies. Its effect is for the rich to have more money in their bank accounts, not for investments to generate employment as the proponents would like us to believe.
If at all our rich oligarchs were to invest their savings from such tax reduction, they will do it abroad, like in nearby Asean countries like Thailand, Vietnam and nearby China, as they had been doing for many years already. The reason is, they see the country as hopeless, so rotten with corruption.
So there we go. We will always be hungry, as this pandemic continues to ravage us. Then, thereafter, we have to prepare for the next one.
We just have to rely on ourselves and wait for no one. Not even the government.**