ERADICATING poverty and reducing inequality in society may not be possible in less than a decade, according to civil society groups.
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 1 on eradicating poverty and 10 on reducing inequality must be achieved by 2030, less than a decade from today.
The groups said the SDGs will not be achieved in the country as long as the government refuses to adopt progressive policies that bring about real development and pushes neoliberal policies that benefit the few.
“While the SDGs at first glance aren’t objectionable, as a framework for development, these are deeply flawed and fail to address the structural problems that perpetuate poverty and inequality,” Ibon Executive Director Sonny Africa said in a statement.
Ibon Foundation Inc. said the country remains on track to meet only 22 percent of the SDG targets. The country was lagging or regressing in the remaining 78 percent, he asserted.
Africa noted that for SDG 1, the main limitation of the targets is the low threshold set to be considered as living in extreme poverty which is less than $1.25 a day.
He said this discounts millions of people that make more than this, but are in poverty. This is the case in the Philippines, where the government does not consider Filipinos living on P72 per day on average as poor.
Africa said “shallow standards” were also set to achieve SDG 10. For instance, one of the targets is faster income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population than the national average.
“This means nothing if income growth is minimally improved for the bottom 40 percent while the rich still get richer and the huge wealth gap remains or even widens,” Ibon said in a statement.
Further, Center for Development Programs in the Cordillera (CDPC) Executive Director Rhoda Dalang said one of the difficulties of achieving SDG 10 includes the discrimination against indigenous peoples (IP) which she claimed has worsened under the Duterte administration.
Dalang said there are instances of “genocidal and ethnocidal oppression of the Lumad people (as well as) big infrastructure projects like the Kaliwa, Jalaur and Genned dams that destroy livelihoods and the environment and displace IPs.”
She also said policies like the Anti-Terror Law are being used to brand IPs as terrorists when they resist major infrastructure projects.
Rius Valle of the SOS Network also said attacks on Lumad schools continued due to the resistance of these communities in the “corporate plunder of their ancestral lands.”
He said there have already been 1,030 cases of human-rights violations against the Lumad with 93,977 victims.
“Some of these attacks include the closure of Lumad schools, militarization, killings, illegal arrests and freezing the accounts of organizations that support the Lumad,” Valle said in a statement.
These views were shared at a recent forum for the July PH Civil Society SDG Watch series titled, “Rising above the health and economic crisis in the time of Covid-19” organized by the Council for People’s Development and Governance.
Representatives from various sectors in the recent forum also shared how government have not taken the SDGs on poverty and inequality seriously.
Other organizations who joined included the Bai Network of Indigenous Women (BAI), Save Our Schools Network (SOS), Panay Council for People’s Development (PCPD), and the Moro-Christian People’s Alliance (MCPA).