Rights watchdog bewails Metro Manila move to hide slum as capital hosts international meet

Manila: A New York-based rights watchdog has bewailed a move by officials to fence a certain area of the capital region, apparently to conceal slums from visiting delegates to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) meet.

According to the Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Philippine government has put up barriers to prevent participants to the ADB annual meeting in Manila from seeing a shanty town, whose residents ironically, are beneficiaries of a poverty alleviation programme financed by the bank.

"By blocking off struggling families behind a fence, the Philippine government is sending the message that dire poverty can just be ignored," according to Jessica Evans, senior international financial institution advocate at Human Rights Watch.

A semi-permanent wall had been put up across a bridge from the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to the Philippine International Convention Centre in suburban Pasay City to conceal a slum area.

"Instead of trying to hide the poor, the Philippine government should be pressing the bank to tackle poverty head on," said Evans.

Some 4,000 delegates have been arriving in Manila since May 2 for the 45th annual meeting of the bank's board of governors. The event, which brings together ministers of finance and development, central bankers, private sector representatives, civil society activists, and journalists will end on May 5. The central topic of the discussions is how ADB can carry out its mission to reduce poverty.

The HRW said that the by Metro Manila to fence the slum areas is uncalled for and hypocritical.

"The Asian Development Bank states that it ‘aims for an Asia and Pacific free from poverty.' (Yet) Some of the families in the blocked-off area are part of an ADB-funded conditional cash transfer programme…" it said.

Under the conditional cash transfer programme, certain qualified families are given $31 a month by the government so that their children can regularly attend school and be provided with medical attention.

The programme from the ADB came as an offshoot of observations made by the World Bank that despite the relative economic improvements made by developing countries such as the Philippines, a large number of its citizens remain impoverished as the gap between the rich and poor widens.

The ADB meeting took place after the independent polling group, the Social Weather Stations, releases its March survey that said that 11.1 million Filipino families rate themselves "poor." This figure is up from 9.1 million households in December last year.

SWS said self-rated poverty nearly doubled in Mindanao, from 38 per cent in December to 72 per cent in March.