This is an interesting question. Whatever happened to the five-year-old kids who were on the “wasted and stunted” list 15 years ago due to malnutrition? I will throw in one answer: many of them may have gone into hopeless lives, then into illegal drugs. And some of them may be part of the rising statistics on the drug users and pushers killed in the current campaign against illegal drugs.

Marlen V. Ronquillo

Ten years ago, the data on child malnutrition was about eight to 10 million and these were the kids who were about to start school or were of elementary school age. It is definitely higher now and according to the Save the Children report, the increase in stunting for kids under 5 years old stepped up to 33 percent in 2016 from 30 percent in 2013.

Poor hair and skin. Bloated stomachs. Decaying teeth. Too short. Too thin. And probably minds that cannot function well. Infirmities and deformities, if left unchecked, will be carried over to adulthood.

A few, perhaps, can escape from this trap and write their own up-from-the-bootstrap stories. But they are the very, very rare exceptions. A child condemned to poverty and the resulting malnutrition may find it hard to write a struggle-against-great-odds story. The rich kids you read about in the glossy magazines graduate from the international high schools based here – then go to Harvard, Stanford or Yale. Or to NYU/USC as the last option. The stunted kids go direct to hellish lives.

And worse, there is a grievous economic cost to the surging problem of child malnutrition. Save the Children calculates it at 3 percent of GDP or about P328 billion a year. How grim is the cost of the failure to rein in child malnutrition? Save the Children framed it in this context – total economic toll is larger than ravages of the 15 natural disasters that hit the country last year.

Here is the breakdown:
P165.5 billion was a result of the lower level of education achieved by members of the workforce who suffered from stunting as kids. P160 billion lost due to premature deaths of children who would have been members of the working force now. P1.23 billion from the additional educational cost to cover grade repetitions linked to malnutrition.

We do not see bodies being fished out of murky waters. We do not see families grieving over their electrocuted next of kin, which is staple fare on primetime TV. We do not see landslides burying entire communities. But the silent, non-TV fare waste of human lives is constant, horrific and relentless.

In Mindanao, child malnutrition is a staggering 40 percent, and here, Save the Children used my favorite area in benchmarking the worst of the PH problems – sub-Sahara. Not only malnutrition. But literacy and poverty levels in regions such as Caraga and the ARMM are at par with sub-Saharan data.

It is not the job of the NGO to establish the link between stunting at an early age to desperation and hopelessness at the adult stage. But the TV footage of the dead from the drug war of the government presents a validating optic. Tattooed men and women. Bullet-riddled bodies of long-haired, emaciated young men on flooded, grimy cement floors of shanties in the urban slum colonies. The full and the graphic visuals of hardened young men and women who may have been stunted by malnutrition during their childhood.

Why was 2015 a terrible year for child malnutrition? What happened to the 6-7 percent growth rate from 2010 to 2015, which was the dominant pursuit of the previous administration? Consistent GDP growth should have reined in, even by a bit, the malnutrition problem if we were to believe the “inclusive growth” spiel of the previous government. Instead, malnutrition surged in a supposed age of economic plenty.

Two reasons for this:
Trickle-down is bunk and is a discredited theory. Pope Francis has been telling us this hard truth since the start of his papacy and our leaders just failed to listen. The previous administration served the Top 1 percent and left the vulnerable to fend for themselves.

Mr. Aquino scrapped the pork barrel program, which had a single noteworthy component – child feeding programs by the senators and congressmen. School-based child feeding was the only program in the whole pork barrel set up not sullied by corruption and it was scrapped when the pork barrel program was scrapped.

Is the Duterte administration trying to establish the link between malnourished childhood and desperate, hopeless adulthood, which, in most cases, would lead to drug-dependent lives?

I don’t know. But it should complement its relentless campaign against illegal drugs with a sustained and focused campaign to ease child malnutrition. Try, it must.

This is a certainty. Today’s stunted child will be tomorrow’s drug addict. (30)

This story was originally published by The Manila Times, Philippines

IESE, the graduate school of business of the University of Navarra, recently released a ranking of the “smart cities” of the world. This is a yearly ritual for the Opus Dei-founded school, which has a solid reputation as one of the best graduate schools of business in Europe.

Marlen V. Ronquillo

The only Asian country on top of that list is Seoul. Sydney, also in the top 10, would not consider itself an Asian city. The notable absence was Tokyo, now ranked 12th. It used to be very high on that list. Singapore was relatively high in the list, too.

Where was Metro Manila? It was given a kulelat status—145th out of 181 cities surveyed. In contrast, the Vietnamese city named after Uncle Ho—Ho Chi Minh—was in the middle of the list, with Canton and Shenzhen.

Why was Metro Manila among the kulelats? It was viewed as failing the 10 distinct benchmarks used by the IESE study: economy, technology, human capital, social cohesion, international outreach, environment, mobility and transportation, urban planning, public management, and governance. While some foreigners revel in the chaos of Metro Manila, the serious students on what makes a city “smart” were not impressed.

The list just validated the earlier report that the Philippines ranked low in the general area of “competitiveness.” One cannot be “smart” by being laid-back, complacent, indolent and incurious.

On top of the benchmarks was “economy.” Why MM was ranked low, we do not know. MM, according to data, accounts for more than 30 percent of the country’s GDP. The rest just account for the more than 60 percent. Was that not impressive enough, given MM’s disproportionate share of the country’s total GDP? And given the Aquino government’s boast of impressive GDP growth? Why were the IESE people not impressed?

The failure of MM’s economy to impress, despite its outsize role in the country’s economy, may be related to the next two criteria—technology and human capital.

The output of Metro Manila may not be impressive enough to those looking for elements of smartness. There are no serious technology hubs, no world-class innovation facilities, no venture capitalists that exist to fund the would-be Twitters, Ubers or Airbnbs. We have small-scale versions of all that, but they are not even impressive from an Asian context. The IESE people found nothing that could change the world with the kind of technology and innovation work being done in MM.

Our technology workers are BPO workers, doing routine voice and tech support work. And the elite technology workers are in security, firewall, network engineering and some programming. If we go down below the work chain, we will find service industry workers, from fast-food crew to restaurant staff, who mostly serve the BPO staffers.

Growth is driven by consumer spending, mostly the OFW income that is being spent in Metro Manila, and the BPO income. With the human capital engaged in dreary, boring, underpaid jobs, those looking for elements of smartness will not really be impressed. No Sundar, no Satya will emerge from the human-capital pool.

The government allocates very little for research and development. The top research university in the country has the physical space required to host and nurture great technology hubs. But it does not have the funding. It does host squatter colonies.

The P1.4 trillion PPP spending does not even allocate a peso for technology hubs.

We can’t even talk about “environment.” Look at the Pasig River, the grand old river that is dying if not yet dead, with almost zero BOD. Look at the air pollution index. Our air pollution trackers conk out after some use due to the gravity of the air pollution. Just look at Manila Bay after days of rain. You can easily net 10 tons of garbage along the seawall alone. Look at the blight and overall grimness of the urban slums.

Transportation and mobility is our Waterloo. Waze, the traffic-monitoring app, just ranked Metro Manila traffic as the worst in the world. The endless gridlock has been exacting a grievous economic and psychological toll on the nation. Yet, traffic management is about neglecting the urban rail system and discriminating against the de facto mode of mass transport—buses. Private vehicles, which each carries one-and-a-half passengers on the average, are king. What kind of transport policy holds cars sacrosanct except in our stupid, and science- and math-ignoring country?

Governance? MM’s grand cities are governed by ex-felons, comedians, and sons and daughters of dynastic families.

Urban planning? The so-called “urban planners,” who bloviate on primetime TV, are mostly poseurs.

This story was originally published by The Manila Times, Philippines