DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Militant youth group Anakbayan on Friday posed yet another challenge to government officials – this time to President Rodrigo Duterte and his economic managers: Try living on P71 budget in a day.
The group reacted to the pronouncement of the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) that P10,727 is the minimum amount for a Filipino family of five to afford their food and non-food needs in a month, or around P71 per individual.
“To say that P10,000 is enough for a family to live decently coming from economic managers earning P257,809 per month is a grievous insult to every hardworking Filipino family!” said Alex Danday, national spokesperson of Anakbayan.
Based on the monthly poverty threshold, PSA said that the poverty incidence fell to 12.1 percent, down from 16.6 percent in 2018 and 23.3 percent in 2015.
In 2018, around 5.9 million Filipinos were no longer considered poor, according to PSA.
Anakbayan, however, responded that the government’s data is “tampered with delusions of economic development”, stressing that the conditions and wages of many Filipinos remain dismal.
“It is doubly insulting that the masterminds of neoliberal economic policies—the ones opposing the end to contractualization, the raising of the minimum wage, caused runaway inflation due to TRAIN, the same economic managers who opposed the Free Tuition Law—are the ones with the gall to say that P10,727 is enough, when their policies are the ones causing poverty!” she said.
“Only through providing decent regular jobs, just wages, genuine land reform, and accessible social services can we alleviate the Filipino people from dire hunger,” she added.
Last time, progressive groups including Anakbayan also dared Presidential spokesperson Salvador to take public transportation to go to work after he insisted that Metro Manila is not experiencing a transportation crisis. (davaotoday.com)
