Arroyo trumpets accomplishments in past 9 years

President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo boasted of her administration’s accomplishments in the past nine years on Wednesday, claiming that economic growth is "making positive impact on the lives of real people." The President, whose term is ending in the middle of the year, took pride in stable consumer prices, which she claimed had been the lowest among all administrations. The average inflation rate for 2009 was 3.2 percent compared with 9.3 percent in 2008, and is projected at 4.7 percent this year. Arroyo also commended the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) for surpassing collection targets. "The BIR has come back to meeting or even surpassing its targets," Mrs. Arroyo said. She also cited the Agriculture department for generating one million jobs. "A critical component was the ability to establish security including allocation of sources [and] economic development targets for areas such as Mindanao," she added. The country’s poverty incidence slid by three points to 30 percent in 2003 from 2000, but escalated to 32.9 percent in 2006 despite economic growth, according to the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB). Arroyo also took credit for the peso’s strength against the dollar. The local currency jumped from a yearly average of P50.99 per dollar in 2001 to P47.64 in 2009, central bank and NSCB data showed. "My friends tell me that ours is the only administration with the strongest peso at the end [rather] than at the beginning," she said. The President also said her administration had build post-harvest facilities, including farm-to-market roads — double the number of those built by previous administrations combined. "That is why we redeemed the promise of land reform by distributing millions of hectares [to Filipinos]," she said. Mrs. Arroyo also boasted of allotting P100 million this year for education and building 100,000 classrooms, increasing the national achievement rate to 55 percent from 44 percent. "We built more schools, brought water to remote towns and provided cash [to] the poorest one million families," she said. Government housing projects, she claimed, had benefited 300,000 families, including 90,000 dwellers along railroads. "We have also ensured that more and more families are able to own a home, thus giving 300,000 families a chance to meet their goal of homeownership. Part of this are the 90,000 families that we relocated from the riles (railroads)," the President said. "These are the differences that have been made in the last nine years. But what is important is not so much what we have done than where the nation is going," she said. "The nation is in a better shape than when we have founded it. I want the poor to prosper and for the middle class to lead this nation to the verge of success in 20 years," she added. The number of poor Filipinos has been increasing despite relatively steady economic growth in recent years, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) earlier said. In a study titled "Poverty in the Philippines: Causes, Constraints, and Opportunities," the Manila-based lender said the country’s yearly poverty reduction rate of 0.47 percent between 1990 and 2005 was slower than in Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. Only in the Philippines has the overall number of poor people increased during that period, it added. The number could further rise as a result of the global economic crisis and recent increases in the poverty incidence, the ADB warned. — Nikka Corsino/NPA, GMANews.TV