AS I write this on a Wednesday, the very first food riot has just occurred in Quezon City, amid the Luzon-wide enhanced community quarantine (ECQ). Or should I say, lack of food riot?
As the news of the event unfolded on my Twitter feed, it showed about 200 people massed up along Edsa, on what is the property of Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) where its Vertis North mixed-use development is located. They were protesting because until that day apparently, they had yet to receive any food packs from the Quezon City local government, headed by Mayor Joy Belmonte.
The protestors were from Sitio San Roque—patron saint of the sick and invalid, by the way—which is actually a squatters’ area on the property where the Vertis North community is now being built and expanded. The site’s entrance, if I’m not mistaken, is actually along Agham Road, across the Philippine Science High School and a few government agencies.
From the upper floors of the Seda Hotel, guests can actually see the tops of the makeshift houses of these informal settlers in Sitio San Roque. And there are still thousands of them. (This is the reason the hotel often draws its shades in the various rooms situated on the side facing the Quezon City Memorial Circle; when one looks down, one can see the said community.) There has been talk in the past that the Quezon City government, then headed by Mayor Herbert Bautista, had already paid the informal settlers twice, to be relocated to Bulacan, where their new community is located. I can’t verify that to a hundred percent certainty, but there must be dire reasons for these settlers to be staying put in this community instead of choosing to accept free houses and lots in Bulacan.
For one, of course, their jobs are probably here. Whenever I pass Agham Road, I would often notice some dump trucks, which collect garbage around Quezon City parked there. This led me to believe that some of those truck drivers and garbage collectors actually live in Sitio San Roque and, thus, actually work for the local government.
That the residents in that community should have already been relocated elsewhere is no reason for the Quezon City government to neglect them. And ignoring them doesn’t make them disappear.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard of the local government’s inadequate food rations to the poor in the Quezon City since the ECQ was imposed by Malacañang. I’ve lived in this city my entire life, and there are numerous pockets of informal settlers here, who apparently are only useful to the powers-that-be whenever elections come around.
Amid this ECQ, however, they are the first to be overlooked when basic services are to be extended. The photos and videos of the mayor handing out food packs are very telling; they are outside houses with metal gates and painted cemented walls. It seems the mayor may have lost her way.
Of course, LGUs can only do so much. Despite the largesse many urban cities like Quezon City have, they are bound to run out of funds. And if their leaders aren’t smart enough, they will not know how to fund their operations and projects other than borrowing funds from financial institutions.
The Department of Social Welfare and Development also needs to step up and help address the food and other basic concerns of the impoverished in all our communities, not just those in Quezon City. That they don’t even have a timeline when their aid will be released, judging from how its spokesman recently evaded this question on a radio program recently, is telling of how this administration is addressing this health and now food crisis in Metro Manila.
Meanwhile, I found it quite ironic that among the concerns raised by Jaime Augusto Zobel de Ayala, chairman of Ayala Corp., ALI’s parent company, in the recent business tycoons’ meeting with the Inter-Agency Task Force formed to address the coronavirus disease (Covid-19), is the “need to feed the poor,” as per someone’s leaked notes about the meeting, and splashed all over Twitter. Or perhaps it was even prophetic, considering that the first recorded food riot amid the ECQ happened on ALI’s own property.
And while it’s been reported that the company has already given lots of help to the government in addressing the Covid-19 outbreak, it could do well to also look at its own backyard.