Sometimes we will be unable to post full articles here due to copyright laws, so we will provide direct links to the articles instead. The short video we also included below should sum up our current educational state in a nutshell, which in truth is quite abyssmal. -LCDE Staff
Friday, June 7, 2013
Monday, June 3, 2013
What? 2011 too!?
In relation to the article below, the Philippines happens to be also one of 2011's most disaster hit countries as we soon found out in this article (Philippines tops list of disaster hit countries in 2011), which is definitely a worrying trend. This is one list we do not want to be on. For now we leave you with this video of tragic disasters on the Philippines from 1990 to 2010, some natural and some man-made. - LCDE staff
Article of Interest (LOCAL): Philippines is most disaster-affected country in 2012
Philippines is most disaster-affected country in 2012
Source: CDRC-Phil
The Philippines topped the list of countries with the highest mortality rate due to natural disasters in 2012.
The Citizens’ Disaster Response Center (CDRC), a non-government organization based in the Philippines, cited the records of the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), which showed that 2,360 people were killed due to natural disasters in 2012. Coming in second was China with 771 deaths.
CDRC is a partner of CRED, a World Health Organization collaborating center based in Brussels, Belgium, which maintains the Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT: The International Disaster Database).
CRED also reported that in terms of the number of people affected by natural disasters, the Philippines came in second to China. There were 43 million people affected in China; and 12 million in the Philippines.
CDRC’s Deputy Executive Director, Carlos Padolina, said that the Philippines’ ranking was due to Typhoon Pablo (Bopha), the largest disaster that occurred in 2012. Pablo killed over 1,000 people in Southern Philippines.
Meanwhile, citing its own data, Padolina revealed that a total of 471 natural and human-induced disasters occurred in the Philippines in 2012. Compared to the 2011 data, 2012 posed a 9% increase in the number of disaster events recorded by CDRC.
CDRC monitors both natural and human-induced disasters that occur in the Philippines.
“Majority of these disasters were caused by flood with 143 incidents and 7.8 million people affected. The high number of flooding incidents can be attributed to the Southwest Monsoon which inundated much of Luzon in August of 2012,” Padolina said. “However, the major cause of mortality rate last year was Tropical Cyclone,” he added.
Padolina also pointed out the increasing trend in the number of affected people in the last five years. He said the strong typhoons that the Philippines experienced in recent years have contributed a lot to this trend.
Download CDRC’s complete Philippine Disaster Report 2012 here.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Article of Interest (LOCAL): Peasant leaders call for land, justice
Peasant leaders call for land, justice
By RITCHE T. SALGADO
Bulatlat.com
CEBU CITY — More than 200 peasant leaders from 16 regions
and 65 provinces of the country gathered here this week to discuss decades-long
issues that continue to hound the agriculture sector.
Antonio Flores, newly-elected secretary general of the
Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP), revealed that based on reports from
their regional and provincial chapters, landlessness brought about by new forms
of land-grabbing such as land conversion and abuses on farmers’ rights remain
to be the top concerns that continue to hinder the development of the sector.
He believes that the government’s Comprehensive Agrarian
Reform Program (CARP) and its renewed version, CARP-Extension with Reforms
(CARPer), is nothing but a sham that is being used by rich land-owners and
agricultural corporations in legitimizing abuses against farmers, majority of
whom have for generations been working on the land that do not “legally” belong
to them.
KMP believes that in order to solve the issue of
landlessness and to stop abuses, government must show sincere efforts in
addressing the problem by scrapping the bogus CARPer Law and replace it with
the Genuine Agrarian Reform Bill (GARB).
Authored by Anakpawis party-list representative Rafael “Ka
Paeng” Mariano, GARB aims to bring the true essence of agrarian reform into the
country, which is to give land to the farmers.
In contrast, under CARP, government buys the land from
landlords at bloated prices, and then sells it to the “farmer-beneficiaries”
who are required to pay every month for 30 years with yearly interest of six
percent.
“CARP is the most expensive and the longest-running agrarian
reform program in the world,” said KMP deputy secretary general Randall
Echanis.
By 2005, the Land Bank of the Philippines have approved
P41.6 billion ($1.014 billion) as compensation to landowners affected by CARP,
and for CARPer, government has allocated a budget of P150-billion ($3.658
billion) for its five year implementation from 2009 to 2014. Another
P150-billion ($3.658 billion) is to be allocated based on the proposed
extension of the program until 2019.
Echanis, who is also the third nominee of Anakpawis, said
that despite this, CARP remains to be a failure and the effort of government to
extend it for five more years after CARPer’s expiration in 2014, only shows
that the government is not concerned over the welfare of farmers who make up
majority of Filipinos.
Mariano agrees, saying: “Another extension of CARP is the
height of callousness of Aquino, a notorious cacique, to deny our rights to the
land in the face of the Filipino peasantry’s collective clamor for genuine land
reform.”
Echanis said the implementation of CARP is nothing more but
a sham, giving farmers a sense of false belief that they could finally own the
land that they till.
“It is nothing more but a way for then president Corazon
Cojuangco-Aquino to ensure that the Cojuangco’s Hacienda Luisita and other vast
haciendas in the country would be protected from land distribution,” said
Echanis.
He said that ever since CARP was implemented, human rights
violations against farmers have intensified. This includes extra-judicial
killings and enforced disappearances.
According to human rights watchdog Karapatan, during President
Benigno Aquino III’s term alone, from July 2010 to December 2012, there were
137 victims of extrajudicial killings, 77 were peasants; 25 were indigenous
people, whose struggle is also mostly agrarian; and 13 from the urban poor,
majority of whom were also farmers who have been displaced because of land
conversion.
Of the 14 cases of enforced disappearances, meanwhile, 11
were from the peasant sector.
“Farmers asserting their rights to the land are subjected to
human rights abuses, agrarian struggles and peasant leaders are being
criminalized, incarcerated, and worse, are being massacred,” the KMP said in a
statement.
“Simultaneously, CARPER serves as a counter-insurgency
program to drive away farmers from the militant and life and death struggle for
a genuine and truly distributive agrarian reform,” it continued.
Echanis admitted that as much as they want, they could not
stop the increasingly intensifying attacks against peasants asserting their
rights to land. However, what they could do is to put forward the struggles of
the peasants through mass actions that they plan to intensify in the coming
years.
These campaigns would include the bungkalan (land
cultivation), an assertion of a peasant group’s right to cultivate the land;
lakbayan or long marches; camp-outs, and peasant barricades, among others.
Echanis also said they plan to intensify their campaign for
the passing of GARB. However, he clarified that they have no illusion that it
will even pass the House of Representatives.
“Majority of the members of the House of Representatives are
large landowners, so it is expected that they will protect their interests,”
Echanis said.
“Still we will push for GARB’s passage because that is the
right thing to do. More than pushing for its passage in Congress, we would also
continue to take this campaign to the streets, engaging our members, who
compose majority of Filipinos,” he said.
“It is time to put an end to the more than 40 years of
deceptive, anti-farmer, and pro-landlord land reform that is being implemented
by the Aquino government,” said Echanis.
Articles of Interest
Thursday, May 30, 2013
LCDE: DENR, NGO partner for better environment
DENR, NGO partners for better environment
by LCDE staff
The Leyte Center for Development, Inc. (LCDE) together with the Department of Environment
and Natural Resources (DENR) forges partnership for a three-year reforestation
project in Southern Leyte.
Represented by CENRO head Alejandro K. Bautista and
witnessed by DENR Regional Executive Director Manolito Ragub, the department
partnered with the award-winning local non-government organization headed by
executive director Jazmin Jerusalem, formalized through a memorandum of
agreement conducted in CENRO San Juan in Southern Leyte.
LCDE is currently implementing a three-year project
funded by the BMZ or the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and
Development and Plan Germany, which covers the ecosystem restoration of the
uplands, the lowlands and the coastal area in two municipalities, Silago and
Saint Bernard.
The project, Adaptation to Climate Change by
Strengthening Natural Resilience may compliment the National Greening Program
(NGP) of the DENR, which includes the development of the 10-15meter forest
zones for protection and to identify boundaries between timberland and alienable
and disposable lands, said Bautista.
During the MOA signing, Ragub expressed his support for
the renewed partnership with LCDE, this time on the issue of climate change.
“This is a good opportunity to be hand in hand again with old partners,” he said.
He also saw the relevance of the project, especially
on the province of Southern Leyte that is historically vulnerable to several
different hazards.
“I am also happy to note that the initiatives of the
offices in this program are focus on the environmental development, which is
also part of the Five Major Pillars
of development of our President Aquino,” said Ragub. “That we are guided by
these major programs of the government, partnered by competent NGOs.”
Ragub also mentioned that LCDE has pioneered such
partnership between the DENR and an NGO in the region for the upland
development, specifically in the reforestation and agroforestry, to benefit and
empower the communities in the selected project areas.
The ceremony was held in Feb. 21, 2013, attended by
guests from CENRO, DENR-8, LCDE and people’s organization in Saint Bernard and
Silago.
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