Ending Poverty (Sixth of Series)

BIMBO CABIDOG

Dynamics of economic modernization or industrialization

The other pivotal development is industrialization, the ultimate solution that will seal the history of poverty and spur off unprecedented development. What does it mean?

Industrialization is the modernization of social production characterized by the predominant use of machines and the organization of labor forces in a workplace. It is an epoch that saw the rise in human productivity and output never seen in the historical development of society. It is a time when the capacity of labor has magnified several fold with technological innovation and the introduction of machinery.

Only genuine industrialization for such a Third World country as the Philippines can increase production exponentially and generate the kind of prosperity that will improve the lives of the masses on a general scale. Only such a development can make it possible to raise incomes above deprivation levels, raise standards of living, and establish a reliable domestic market.

That full-fledged industrialization will spur off progress by leaps and bounds stands to reason and experience. Productivity will be at never attained heights before, and because of this, economic growth will proceed on a speed never hitherto experienced. Jobs will multiply. Outputs and levels of money will break records.

The sheer force and magnitude of progress absent the equitable distribution of wealth yet can already severe the chain of poverty. Indeed, the country’s transformation into a modern industrial economy can result in bailing masses of the people out of chronic hunger, dire impoverishment, helplessness, and stagnation.

What is the configuration of the new development? First, to fully and genuinely industrialize, there must be capital goods production. The capital goods industry includes such commodities needed in production itself as steel, machinery, power, power generation capacity, energy, communication infrastructure components, electronic raw materials, construction materials, engineering equipment, and inputs to manufacturing. The CGI supplies the requirements of industry itself.

Department I or the capital goods industry cannot be done away with. It plays a strategic role and is indispensable in industrialization.

Liberating the countryside

How will the country go into industrialization? What historical factors must be realized before this can actually proceed.

First is the emancipation of rural folks and their resources from the slaveries of the past. The nation must now be unstuck from feudal stagnation. It must be able to free the forces of production in the countryside for rapid growth. The individual lot tillers and farm workers excruciating under age-old production systems and the counterproductive domination of landlords must find release to shape a new economic destiny.

It may only be done by an agrarian reform that corrects the historical injustice of having land owned. Because of this, the actual workers or tillers of the land lose a means of production. The landlords who now have control over it subject them to choking squeeze. They attune it to large-scale cash crop production. By doing so, the peasants are left with nothing to eat, except what they can buy with their starvation income. The landlords further intensify production to squeeze more money, but give the peasants so little from the yield to live on. The feudal order strangles the forces of production and stifles overall economic growth. It has to be dismantled.

Land should be returned to the ones who work on it. There and then only can they regain control over the means of production and attune it to their best interest. If they think farm diversification is better than the old monopoly plantation, their will be done. As opposed to the previous order, their decision on what to do with the land will now be followed to their greater benefit. Only then can productivity and production pick up, and rural prosperity fueled by unprecedented agricultural progress become a concrete reality.

Rural prosperity is the main lever to catapult industrialization. It will provide the surpluses needed to create savings in huge amounts. The savings can then constitute the financial resource to convert into capital for strategic nascent industries. Land and human resource present the biggest largely untapped potentials that lay in the countryside for genuine industrialization. The only requirement is for them to be released from the stranglehold of the outmoded production system whose place should already be in the past.

With rural prosperity, the country is able to create the size of market viable for industry. The maximum employment of workforces by a highly progressive agricultural sector, accompanied by a steep rise in incomes, can result in a dramatic increase of purchasing power in the countryside. That increase further expands in the generation of new jobs or livelihoods, out of agriculture allied industries, or downstream processing industries that add value to farm products. The segment of the population now lifted up from the poverty threshold by prosperity in the countryside is quite a bankable domestic market for a thriving industrialization.

It might be necessary to remind again. The historical condition that can spur all these is only the liberation of the countryside from landlord rule.