Decent, sufficient employment needed to improve quality of life —NAPC's Maza

National Anti-Poverty Commission chief Liza Maza on Thursday said decent and adequate jobs are needed to eradicate poverty.

“We need to create decent and sufficient employment with living wages to improve the quality of life of most Filipinos,” Maza said in a statement released for the launching of NAPC's new book, "Reforming Philippine Anti-Poverty Policy".

The book, with Jose Enrique Africa as lead author, stresses that poverty eradication should be the centerpiece of economic, social, and environmental policies.

According to the NAPC, the book is advocating having decent and sufficient jobs and incomes as the main strategy in eradicating poverty.

"It identifies poor employment generation with low incomes as the biggest factor in the country’s inability to significantly reduce poverty," NAPC said.

It also said structural transformation of the economy, including agriculture and industrial production, is important and should serve as "long-term basis of national development goals."

Maza also said foreign investments need to be regulated to make room for the creation of domestic industries for local employment.

"Our self-reliance as a domestic economy has been drowned in an export-oriented, import-dependent industrial strategy, allowing foreign monopolies to squander our national resources and benefit from cheap labor," she said.

Maza also noted that the level of income as a poverty indicator "does not take into account the myriad of deprivations from which poor people suffer."

Poverty, she added, "erodes the right of Filipinos to the most basic of needs such as food, shelter, health, work and education."

The book pushes for a rights-based approach  to poverty eradication so as to address structural inequalities and uphold people's right to participate in policy and decision-making processes, the NAPC said.

“Poverty is an infringement on human rights. Failure to recognize this resulted in band-aid anti-poverty programs that only perpetuated a vicious cycle of poverty among Filipino families,” said Maza.

“Many Filipinos are still trapped in poverty and inequality because administration after administration, we have subscribed to the same neoliberal framework that has been proven as a development failure all over the world. Free-market economics failed to develop our local agriculture and industry,” she added.

According to the third quarter 2017 survey of the Social Weather Stations, 47 percent of Filipinos rated themselves poor. That translates to an estimated 10.9 million families. —Margaret Claire Layug/KG, GMA News