Letter to a quixotic friend (part 3)

BEFORE we tackle the IT issue, let me delve a little on the commerce and trade centered in Tacloban, the regional and provincial hub. The city derives its existence mainly on the high density of government employees and student population here. Consider the employees of the city government, the province and the regional offices, and note the amount of cash being put into circulation every 15th day of the month, this being spent in the markets, stores and emerging malls, the various little eateries you can see sprouting everywhere. Add the tens of thousands of student population coming from all parts of the region and the allowances they spend on food, clothing, school items and various other small items, and you’ll have a vibrant commerce and assorted services rising to meet the demand, starting from the barbecue stalls to the huge shopping mall. owned by the Gokongwei family, that’s being constructed in Marasbaras.

In this kind of setup, no new values are created or added because no industries have resulted from the demand. Local merchants are content with selling goods made elsewhere and adding a few percentages for their services and profit. Here is a perfect example of money being circulated or passed on from one hand to another, without anything new being produced. The look of prosperity is all on the surface, and people are easily led to believe in illusions of prosperity with the new rising malls and their air-conditioned ambience, the fast food chains like Jollibee, MacDonald, Wimpy’s, Dunkin’ and the rest of chicken-serving eateries. While these stores may be paying real estate taxes to the city government, their net effect is to siphon off hard cash elsewhere. The reality is, every 15 days, the local economy suffers from cash shortages to the tune of several hundreds of millions.

Smart bracelet watch

This is where the local IT industry – the outsourced call centers and the typing jobs – are being bragged about as the wave of the future, the inexorable path to 21st century progress. For sure it’s earning a lot of dollars from clients abroad, giving some of our most talented young men and men ample opportunities to earn five digit figures, serving clientele born and bred in the king’s English, in cozy cub holes where time zones merge and get lost in the convoluted twang of an alien culture. Yes, these dollars will feed the thousands of extended family members that still cling to their high-earning brods and sis and get to shop in the city’s emerging entrepots.

But the “IT” tag is nothing but a misplaced name. For one, information here is neither gathered, stored, processed nor retrieved using technology. What people do is memorize information and pass it on to others who are either too lazy to read handbooks or too dumb to understand them, answering relevant questions as they come and trying to sound as cool and relaxed in the nuances of the language they were trained for. This is what call centers are and this is what they do.

You would expect that our local governments and its agencies would be armed with the latest database technologies, but on closer look one discovers computers are utilized as mere typewriters, with additional capabilities to play music and video games most useful during breaks or when the boss is gallivanting somewhere. Data are still stored in the good old filing cabinets, gathering dust and termites with misuse or the lack thereof. When elsewhere in the world database technologies process information in seconds for local executives and policy makers to act on, here in the province our data are found in 10-year old folders typewritten on brittle bond paper now brownish with age. Indeed, we should store these in museums and archives where these will be put to better use by historians and anthropologists.

Evidently our local executives do not appreciate the value of computerized data, accustomed as they are to govern by guesswork. Our local executives routinely make decisions about what projects to implement, and viability or importance are not even part of the criteria. Projects have become political issues to be determined by the amount of largesse they get and the number of protégés that can be employed in the process. Development issues are far from their minds. Thus, having accurate data would make no sense to them, let alone storing them in some sophisticated, state-of-the-art technology.

Smart watch and heart monitor

So “IT” in the province refers to that outsourcing business and call centers. It has in no way influenced the way government institutions process their data or make intelligent decisions. Such kind of enterprise can never be rightfully called the “wave of the future”. Its contribution to the local economy consist in a little more than the six-digit figures earned by its workers, its sustainability dependent on the temper of the world elsewhere. It cannot be depended on to survive the onslaught of the financial disaster gripping other parts of the world, and at any moment’s notice, it could close down its operations.

Our strongest weapon against foreign-induced crisis is still that part of our agriculture that produces our food, assuming that we cut off our dependence on genetically modified seeds (hybrid varieties), on chemical fertilizers and pesticides and on farming systems that set the market as the focus of production. Otherwise, we fall back into the pitfalls of that infamous “green revolution” that has consigned majority of our farmers in the vicious cycle of perpetual indebtedness and grinding poverty.