'The Scourge of Climate Change' By Fr Shay Cullen (Olongapo City)

The waters of the great flood of Metro Manila and Laguna may have receded somewhat, yet they have left behind destroyed communities and thousands of impoverished families. The emotional scars remain, caused by the loss of loved ones, children and parents, drowned, and thousands of homes, lovingly built brick by brick collapsed and in ruins. That's the aftermath of the floods.

Lack of prevention has been underlined as the biggest cause of such human suffering. No foresight or emergency response teams were ready. Few trained disasters or emergency medical personnel were available. Billions of public funds that should have developed public safety emergency plans and resources have disappeared through corruption, waste and mismanagement.

Why is it that we have to see the bloated bodies of dead children, parents and heroes, swept away by flood waters and a torrent of national and international criticism before government officials and big business tycoons feel the sting of shame and are forced to act however sluggishly for the public good and not always for there own gain.

Every year there are floods and the engineers, bankers and politicians know why and they know what should have been done. The Manila Times has revealed in an exclusive report a few weeks ago that one major cause of the floods are the alleged corruption riddled delays of a vitally important multi-billion peso flood alleviation project.

The huge mega project of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) worth US$14 million, known as the Pasig-Marikina River Improvement Project was supposed to start last 2007 and be complete in 2013 yet hardly a bulldozer has moved or a backhoe mobilized. It is the Marikina Valley that has been most devastated by the floods. We have to research the factors that are causing such disasters, is it incompetence, politicking, corruption? Hundreds have died because of the snail like pace of project implementation.

Likewise the Kamanava Area Flood Control and Drainage System improvement Project in the same area Northeast of Metro Manila worth US$15 million has also been delayed. It was due to be completed last 2007. It is 90.5% complete but until now that vital last section has remained uncompleted due to the haggling and bargaining going on over money and payments for the right of way compensation.

The necessity for such flood control projects is simple, the forests have been cut down, the soil is washing away so there is nothing left to absorb the rains. Corrupt politicians protecting logging companies and promoting the interests of foreign mining companies are behind the loss of 70% of the forest cover of the Philippines over the past 60 years. The archipelago was one massive rain forest at the turn of the century, now it is has just a few scraps left.

Even those remaining forests could be a starting point for regeneration and reforestation, but they too are being hacked to the ground, all laws forbidding it are ignored. Three weeks ago, I saw a huge truck hauling massive cut trees through the heart of Manila.

Reforestation is one of several important things that the G20 nations of global community need to do to slow global warming. The forests and the seas are the great absorbers of the deadly CO2 gas that we generate by burning coal and oil in our power stations and cars. Yet it is too late to reverse global warming by replanting trees alone. Climate change is coming on faster than predicted. We have to turn to renewable sources of energy on a massive scale and stop burning fossil fuel.

While the insatiable and criminal greed of Wall Street financial traders and the irresponsible bankers of the world brought the global economy to the brink of disaster, it is becoming clear they are too powerful to restrain, regulate and control.

Perhaps they could be directed to turn their propensity for profit to funding the next great industrial revolution of renewable energy and the electric car. Such massive investment is needed to save the planet from irreversible climate change and reduce the severity of the floods, droughts and famine that are on the way to the poorest of the poor everywhere. (Preda Center, Upper Kalaklan, Olongapo City, Philippines. E-mail:preda@info.com.ph)

Big bucks trade

Juan Mercado - www.inquirer.net
"The flight schedule was pinned on the wall. And the pimps argued that they had an understanding with 'the chief,'" recalled the team fielded by Fr. Shay Cullen. "But the cops who came with us were from another station."

As payoff discussions raged, the Preda team sped off with a mother and a child. "If only we could have rescued all the girls, it'd have been a great day's work," the Preda team said. "Unfortunately, that was impossible. They were all teenagers. And one had a baby."

Welcome to what the US Department of Justice ranks as the third largest criminal enterprise worldwide: human trafficking. It is big bucks. "Traders" rake in $9.5 billion yearly in sleaze, the United Nations Development Fund for Women's Noeleen Heyzer said at an Asian Development Bank meeting.

Trafficking ranges from prostitution and debt bondage to forced labor and exploitation of children as sex slaves or soldiers. In this grim underground bazaar, firm data are hard to come by. "The stigma placed on victims of sexual exploitation" is one reason. There isn't "even a name for the problem at community level." Few victims are aware of their rights.

The extent is under-reported, but what emerges jolts. Fifty-four out of every 100 trafficked Filipino children are between 15 and 17 years old. "Guesstimates" of the number of child prostitutes range from 60,000 to 100,000.

In Joey Velasco's "Hapag Ng Pagasa" ["Table of Hope"] painting of 12 street kids at dinner with Christ on a slum table, one model -- Tinay, 5 -- had been repeatedly raped. "She has this faraway look," wails the aunt.

Globally, 12.3 million migrants are enslaved or in sexual servitude at any one time, says the International Labor Organization. Massive poverty, corruption and armed conflict force-feed desperate migrants, in ever greater numbers, into affluent nations that in "an age of migration alarm" are closing borders.

Girls from the villages of Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines are lured into cities or abroad with pledges of well-paying jobs. Many end up in brothels. "It is not acceptable to have a crisis of survival where the only way out for a family to survive is by trafficking their daughters," Heyzer added.

"We will leave your family P3,000, which will be your usual salary in Cebu," the recruiter told the teenager, University of Nevada's Riki Repanis recalls in "Prostitution, Trafficking and Modern Day Slavery in the Philippines." The ill father rose to hug his daughter, crying: "Be careful, be careful." All nine siblings wept. But the girl insisted that she must go and help her family. "So they went to Cebu and were brought to Kamagayan, the old place of prostitution in Cebu City. That first night, she was raped by eight men."

Government disbanded its airport anti-trafficking team a month ago. Why? Because every manjack trafficked. Read and squirm over what the US State Department asserted in its "Trafficking Persons Report" of June 2007:

"The Philippines is a source, transit and destination country for men, women and children trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation and forced labor. A significant number of Filipino men and women, who migrate for work, are subjected to involuntary servitude in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, South Africa, North America and Europe.

"Women and children are trafficked within the Philippines, primarily from rural areas in the Visayas and Mindanao, to urban areas. (They do) forced labor as domestic and factory workers, and in the drug trade, and for sexual exploitation.

"A smaller number of women are occasionally trafficked from the People's Republic of China, South Korea, Japan and Russia to the Philippines for sexual exploitation... Foreign tourists, particularly other Asians, sexually exploit women and children."

Cebu City is a major destination point for traffickers. Samar, Bohol, Leyte and Negros Occidental record a rising number of victims. So do a number or Mindanao cities.

Some traffickers harness the Internet for their operations. "Many women end up working for pornography websites where they perform sexual acts in front of webcams for paying customers."

Countries need to "raise public awareness and create public outrage," adds Heyzer. And they must "make it difficult for traffickers to operate with impunity."

The Philippine record is mixed. In Olongapo City, foreign sex traffickers harass Catholic and other groups by lodging multiple libel and other suits. A major target has been Father Cullen and his hospices for the abused. Department of Justice officials seek to blunt this harassment.

The Philippines was the first country to adopt in 2003 an Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act. And Quezon City Regional Trial Court Judge Teodoro Bay sentenced a couple to 160 years in prison for peddling "starlets" to moneyed sex trade clients. There are seven convictions now.

Overall the Philippines has enough laws, says the Nevada University study. "The problem is implementation."

In Cebu, a task force operated ineptly. Police were untrained. Lawyers lacked understanding of the new law. "The net effect seems to be punishment of the girls, not the perpetrators."

"They sit there and look, like this [Cebu] 'barangay' [neighborhood district] official," the Nevada University study quotes a nun helping girls trapped in the red light district. "But he has his own bars. Many of the brothels there are owned by policemen. 'Oh, he is my customer,' a girl will tell us. And now, he is the one who imprisons me."