Republic Act (RA) 8550 or the Philippine Fisheries Code of the Philippines of 1998 cites two important provisions that safeguard the socio-economic lives of the fisherfolk and the environmental state of the seas: (1) ensuring the preferential rights of the municipal fisherfolk in municipal waters; and (2) setting the municipal…
Leave a CommentICSI Posts
In Myanmar a fragile decade of democracy has suddenly been snuffed out by a military coup. The country’s elected leaders were taken away in military vans in the dead of night, and slapped with flimsy charges that do not even begin to obscure the blatant power struggle at play. Water…
Leave a Comment
Despite getting only 5 percent of its proposed P77-billion budget for 2021, the Department of Human Settlements and Urban Development (DHSUD), as Secretary Eduardo del Rosario wrote in his column in the Property section of this paper (1/30/21), is “more than ready to face the challenges of 2021 head on.”…
Leave a Comment
Social protection is key to building the human capital especially of those who are poor and vulnerable. It helps economies and communities grow and prosper. Social protection systems address vulnerabilities by building resilience to future shocks and offering coverage against risk and adversity throughout people’s lives and especially during critical…
Leave a Comment
Initially proposed as a measure to decongest Metro Manila and to promote growth in the provinces as soon as the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon is lifted, the “Balik Probinsya, Balik Pag-asa Program” (BP2) became a controversial response of the Duterte administration to the growing number of COVID-19 cases in…
Comments closed
Development organizations and practitioners have long acknowledged the benefits of inclusive and participatory processes in the planning and execution of development projects. including those funded by the government. The Philippines has a well-established and long-running program under the DSWD that embodies the principles of bottom-up development through an approach called…
Comments closed
Who asked for a white sand beach in Manila Bay? Definitely not the 15,000 or so families languishing in poverty, hunger, and joblessness in Baseco, the biggest coastal informal settlement in Manila. Of course, the truckloads of crushed dolomite boulders that the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) allowed…
Comments closed
On September 12, 2020, the John J. Carroll Institute on Church and Social Issues (JJCICSI) and the Simbahang Lingkod ng Bayan (SLB) held an online presentation of the national situation titled “See, Judge, Act: An Analysis of Social Issues and Discernment on Action, Guided by the Catholic Social Teaching”. Attended online by more…
Comments closed
I recently came across a news article about the country’s Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) which read, “CARP did more harm than good to farm sector, says economist.” The program, the article said, caused the fragmentation of agricultural lands and the eventual disempowerment of farmers who could not sustain the…
Comments closed
Land, lodging, and labor
Guiding his readers on how to find hope amid the deep crisis the world has been facing because of the pandemic, Pope Francis, in his book “Let Us Dream,” gives a vision of what needs to change beyond the individual: “God asks us to dare to create something new. We…