Pernia bewails lack of ADB support

Asian Development Bank (ADB) on Thursday reiterated its commitment to support development projects in the Philippines even as the country’s chief economist lamented the “relatively little” help for population and infrastructure initiatives.

At a forum during the Manila-based multilateral lender’s 51st annual meeting, Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Ernesto M. Pernia said ADB had been mostly “responsive to the development needs of its developing member-countries.”

He said the Philippines had been a lucky beneficiary, having received help in many ways, including assistance in its banner projects, conditional cash transfer and Aksyon 2040 that were meant to address poverty.

However, Pernia, who heads the state planning agency National Economic and Development Authority (Neda), said ADB “has done relatively little” in terms of support for population management, especially family planning. He said this was “a crucial, yet a sensitive and contentious issue at least until very recently—thereby, materially delaying the country’s harvest of the demographic dividend.”

Pernia also said the lender did little to “progressively” narrow the wide infrastructure gap, including the traffic congestion in Metro Manila.

The Neda chief added the ADB was unable to extend enough assistance to the Philippines in addressing interregional disparity, the quality of higher education and health care and the promotion of science, technology and innovation.

“Nevertheless, for its current partnership with the Philippines—probably to make up for past failings—the bank’s thrusts are to foster inclusive growth, and reduce income inequality and regional disparity. Specifically, the focus is on strategic areas: sustainable and climate-resilient infrastructure; good governance and finance; social protection and education; regional economic integration; and infrastructure improvement through the country’s ‘Build, Build, Build’ program,” Pernia said.

Pernia also noted that under ADB’s country operations business plan for the Philippines for 2017-2022, the lender already “generally realigned its emphasis to infrastructure development in response to the country’s infrastructure drive.”

According to Pernia, 12 upcoming big-ticket projects in the transportation, urban infrastructure and water utilities subsectors worth a total of $4.4 billion accounted for nearly two-thirds of ADB’s total lending portfolio for the said six-year period.

For his part, ADB president Takehiko Nakao told a separate press conference that they would continue to support projects in the areas of rural development, education and women empowerment, in line with the Duterte administration’s 10-point socioeconomic agenda aimed at reducing poverty incidence to 14 percent by 2022.

“We are also supporting the CCT [program]. This has been here for some time from the previous government, and we support families to make their kids attend school and to get the regular health checkups by visiting clinics and the condition that we transfer the cash to the families,” Nakao said.

There would also be no letup in monitoring the Mindanao peace process, Nakao added.

“We also want to invest more in Mindanao, because to sustain peace [there], we need to develop [it] in a broader sense. We had a big road project in Mindanao last year,” Nakao said.

ADB also promised to support “very seriously” the Duterte administration’s ambitious “Build, Build, Build” program.

Under “Build, Build, Build,” the government plans to roll out 75 game-changing projects, with about half targeted to be finished within President Duterte’s term, alongside spending a total of over P8 trillion on hard and modern infrastructure until 2022.