Serve the people!

After viewing many government programs through the decades, most people conclude that there is a gap, often a chasm, between what many government workers want to be able to do and what the bureaucracies unwittingly forces them to do.

In the words of Mao Tse Tung, many simply want to “serve the people.”

But the bureaucratic mandates as written by legal minds infected with and narrowed by supervisory mindsets force them to serve bureaucratic or otherwise limited professional sector and/or discipline and even clearly vested interest ends instead.

Our numerous councils, centers and commissions that are supposed to “alleviate poverty” (alternatively “build prosperity”) through the application of science and technology and/or the knowledge of that specialized field (e.g. law and medicine) present us with that problem.

Often lost in the resulting calculus is the original intent and real purpose of government, “serving the Filipino people.”

We have experienced enough programs that show our ability to put together projects that are equal to any in conceptualization in the countries from where our individual professionals earned their advanced credentials, hence for those in government service, the privilege when coming home (all else being equal) is to be chosen to head offices.

Yet, that project so packaged and avidly pushed may prove, as it has a number of times, ill-suited for the realities of most Filipinos, built on levels of science and technologies far more sophisticated than the capacity of our local systems to absorb and use efficiently and effectively, especially in the absence of the required support systems that are almost always outside the rubric of the science and technology being pushed by the projects.

Looking at these issues with the eyes of the persons who are supposed to be most benefited is what is missing and must be put back into the conceptualization of these projects.

Their “simpler” way of viewing issues is all that is needed to lay out action programs that will produce the effects we say we want.

Take two common commodities essential to Philippine Life—bamboo and bananas. A simple sources-and-uses chart accurately constructed will indicate, at the very least, the botanical types of the commodity available in the country, where they are grown (barangay, municipality, province), in what quantities (whatever the relevant or pertinent units of measure are) on one side; and on the other, the uses for which they are put. In between, the costs of producing, harvesting, pre-processing, packaging, transporting and selling and at what unit prices wherever they are sold should be indicated. It is not clear to me that there is a single agency in the country that has collected commodities data in this manner.

For both bananas and bamboo, the ordinary Filipino will seek the data from the “market” (as the word is used by economists). Barring that, she or he will think of the Department of Agriculture. One difficulty is that bamboo grown above a certain land gradient and elevation falls under a different department, Environment and Natural Resources. It is not clear to me that there is a conscious attempt to harmonize and centralize government data of this sort. I will be very happy to be proven wrong. There is one way to do that. Publish the data in popular media!

Take bananas. How much banana does the average Filipino consume in one year? I was told “around 80 kilos.” How many pieces of individual fruit does that translate to? The estimates ranged from 100 to 150 pieces, a function, no doubt, of which variety of banana we are speaking of—“Lakatan,” “Tondan,”  “Senorita” or “Saba.” And we don’t consume these varieties for the same reason and in equal amounts.

The first three varieties are typically eaten fresh or with minimum processing, as when these are cut up and added to fruit salads or garnish desserts. Saba is served mostly in its cooked forms—turon, maruya, banana-cue, chips (including the Ilonggo “pinasugbo”), fried, cooked in syrup, as part of “guinataan,” or added to dishes like “nilaga,” “pochero,” “arroz ala Cubana” and more.

If we had a sources-and-uses map and develop corresponding value chains or webs for each variety, we will immediately spot where we can best help those in the chain or web—growing, pre-processing, packaging, transporting, storing, selling and more value adding—to earn more while helping reduce our often impact on the ecology.

The same can be done for bamboo. To start, we can easily secure a listing of what bamboo species and varieties grown in the Philippines, where they tend to grow best and what hectarage is involved. From these, we get a sense of the supplies available.

On the other side, we can list the various uses we have for bamboo and the amounts of these different varieties that we require—for housing and furniture, for agriculture (support for banana plants, trellises for our climbing vine veggies, etc.) and fisheries (rafts, fishpens, net poles, etc.), for handicrafts, for nutritionals and chemicals, for food (bamboo shoots, for example), for decoration be these in house or garden, for ecological amelioration, etc. Again, the same thinking process on growing, harvesting, stocking, transport and processing should be spelled out.

For both these commodities, indeed for all our current and proposed produce, be these agriculture, fisheries (aquaculture and marine), natural resources, it then becomes easier to identify where appropriate applications of appropriate science and technology, not necessarily state-of-the-art, but science and technology that immediately serve our people with least immediate investments in education and training, policy framework realignment, and the least painful changes in physical-technical and cultural-political relationships and arrangements, will have the most immediate positive effects.

(The article reflects the personal opinion of the author and does not reflect the official stand of the Management Association of the Philippines. The author is professor at the Asian Institute of Management. Feedback at [email protected]. For previous articles, visit www.map.org.ph.)