Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Manila (Agenzia Fides) – Two important issues are on the table for new President Benigno Aquino and, according to Fides sources in the Catholic Church in the Philippines, they will be certain to be included the new guidelines of the government: the issue of agrarian reform and the so-called "pork barrel" or the contributions of public funds that members of Congress and Senators have at their disposition in order to finance local interest projects, usually used to gain votes.
According to the ideas and opinions that Fides has gathered from the Church in the Philippines, agrarian reform - which involves a system of land redistribution from large landowners to peasants-is one of the hot spots where the people will be able to test the sincerity, disinterest, and transparency of the new government, as the President himself comes from a landowning family (see Fides 27/5/10).
Another very useful tool for assessing the real intentions of the government - which has made fighting corruption the center of its program - is an intervention on the "pork barrel" system, which Fides sources note is one of the ganglia of the deeply-rooted and institutionalized corruption mechanism through which pass practices of patronage and cronyism between national politics and local communities, between the central and peripheral administrations.
Filipino Parliamentarians, in fact, decide to whom, how, and where to allocate a certain amount of public money to spend in their communities of origin. This power leads to backroom deals, encourages favors for merely electoral purposes, and facilitates the policy of voting in exchange for favors.
For this reason, the Church – which has spoken out for years against corruption – is calling for its abolition, as was reiterated recently in an interview with Radio Veritas by Bishop Arturo Bastes, Bishop of Sorsogon.
The promotion of local development plans, said the Bishop, should be the responsibility of a specialized government agency, appointed to this role, and not the result of ideas and agreements of parliamentarians. It 's a fact that lies outside their core competency, which is to draft and approve laws. "This ill-practice should be erased forever," said the Archbishop, mentioning the consent of other bishops, Catholic leaders, and a large sections of civil society.
The colorful term "pork barrel" indicates the so-called "Priority Development Assistance Fund (PDAF), which includes money taken from the national budget to finance projects decided on by Senators (in the order of 200 million pesos each) or members of Congress (70 million pesos each).
As sources of Fides affirm, the Catholic Church is asking the Aquino Administration to follow guidelines of transparency, control, usefulness, effectiveness, and relevance in the allocation of funds and the choice of development projects to be funded. There is also an urgent need to identify new mechanisms that can definitively separate such grants from mere private interests and practices of political patronage. The use of the "pork barrel" has been present in the Philippines since 1930, during the American colonial occupation. (PA) (Agenzia Fides 06/07/2010)
