By Joel B. Belinan
The recent onslaught of Typhoon Paeng last week just before the Undas again showed the vulnerability of our country to natural disasters. The last thing I heard is that we are the 2nd. If not already the country most visited by natural disasters in the entire world. I don’t know the number one. Bangaladesh night still be it. The most common are typhoons. Typhoon Paeng wreaked havoc from Mindanao to Northern Luzon. As of this writing, the death toll has far exceeded the century mark and is still counting. On the other hand, the damages to properties particularly in the agricultural sector and public infrastructure have reached billions of pesos ,and again, still climbing as reports from the fields are still being collated.
One very obvious observation of these typhoons is once they hit the southern parts of the country, the human casualties are higher compared to those in the North Luzon area. This was true for Typhoon Paeng as shown by the numbers registered particularly in the Bangsa Moro Autonomous Region with Maguindanao as the epicenter. Not that North Luzon is immune to this type of calamity. Actually we experience much more typhoons here than in the South. However, our lower number of casualties might be due to our better resilience in confronting and in preparing for such calamities. But due to the terrain of the Cordillera, we experience more of the damaging kinds of typhoon effects, like Landslides among others. Thus, we might have higher casual ties from these kinds of calamities.
We are now experiencing the real impact of climate change. For example, the much bigger portion of Mindanao was seldom touched by typhoons about 3 decades ago. The recent two decades however showed that there are no more areas in this country not visited by typhoons. This might be the explanation why many places in the south are hard up in adopting to this phenomenon.
And as if the current economic crisis that we are in is not enough, this typhoon’s impact on our agricultural sector would be tremendous. In effect, it pours cold water on our leaders’ optimism about the agriculture sector’s 4th quarter production to pull up our economy which is already down. My experience of covering the National Statistical Coordinating Board (NSCB) which is now part of the Philippines Statistics Authority (PSA) and the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) gives me an idea of how our economy is affected once the agri-sector is down. While it is true that agri-sector inputs to our overall economy are not overwhelming, the number of people depending on it is more than two third of our population. Thus, once the farming sector is battered by a typhoon, the effect will be disastrous not only to the statistics which the government people love to see but to the actual lives of the people.
The present government’s actions and initiatives in addressing these challenges will determine what kind of administration we installed in the recent election. Take note that it will last for six years.
It is now an accepted fact that social media and the gadgets we use have become a part of our lives. And I mean not only for the young ones but for everyone. At the beginning, maybe 15 years ago, there was a big part of the population that resisted the social media trend including me. However, as the saying goes, change is the only constant thing in this world, and indeed nowadays everyone has to use to a certain extent the social media. While there are many identified negative effects of social media and the advancement of information technology, these cannot be helped and are here to stay and would even become more advanced.
Advancement in Technology should be harnessed to make things easier for us, especially in distance communications but at the same time, it is a double-bladed weapon such that social media may have removed the warmth of actual face-to-face communication among friends, family, and acquaintances. During the recent typhoon Paeng onslaught, Social media provided the most up-to-date news to everyone. At the same time, it provided me company at a time when we were stranded in the confinement of our home.
What amused me is how people are not very careful in reacting to the news. For example, on my FB account, it’s very common to see people liking a post that shows happiness, and positivity, revealing good information among other things. However when one sees a post on a bad news like death or accident or about things that went wrong, still people are liking it. It seems that while we may have embraced social media, people are not very vigilant about how they are using it. Another example is that on November 1, I posted a photo of me and my wife with a caption of my greeting for her birthday. What was funny was some of those friends and even relatives seem to have not read the post as they were greeting me instead of my wife. And so this is my second birthday this year making my age increase twice this year? **
