After the storms, oil a touchy Manila issue

By CARLOS CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 30, 2009

MANILA — When the three largest oil companies in the Philippines increased the pump prices of diesel, gasoline and kerosene on Oct. 20, they set off more than the usual grumbling from consumers and transport groups. With millions of Filipinos still reeling from the effects of successive typhoons, the corporations were criticized as greedy, insensitive, callous and predatory.

The companies — Royal Dutch Shell, Petron and Chevron (known here under the brand Caltex) — increased the per-liter prices of diesel by 2 pesos, or 4 cents, an increase of about 6.7 percent. Gasoline prices went up 1.25 pesos a liter, or a 4.74 pesos a gallon, and kerosene by 1.50 pesos. According to the Ibon Foundation, an independent economic research group, the increases were the biggest of the year. The companies insist the increases reflect world oil prices; crude has risen from as low as $32.40 in December to about $79 this week.

Changes in the price of fuel have been a touchy subject here since 1998, when the government passed the Oil Deregulation Law. In addition to taking away government control of pricing and opening the industry to foreign investment, the law removed longstanding government subsidies of oil products. Although the deregulation has been unpopular with voters, the government has not backtracked — until now.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo issued Executive Order 839 in the past week, demanding that the oil companies reduce their prices on the main island, Luzon, or face penalties.

Many consumers praised the decision and her “political will” and said the decree could help millions of Filipinos recover from the recent calamities. But economists, business groups and industry analysts said the unprecedented intervention could scare investors away from the country, and create fuel shortages and a new black market.

“This government seems to have lost its sense of what it should be doing,” said Peter Wallace, founder of the Wallace Business Forum, a consulting group that advises some of the largest multinational companies in the Philippines. The country, he said, “is attracting the lowest level of foreign investments among major countries in Asia. So you have to ask the question why it issued the executive order.”

Mr. Wallace said if the government wanted to reduce the cost of fuel for consumers, it could have given out discount coupons to those directly affected by the typhoons. As it is, he said, “those with S.U.V.’s are the ones that will benefit from the price controls, not the poor people.”

Except for Shell and Petron, which refine oil in the Philippines, all oil companies here import their finished products. Because the prices of these refined products are tied to world markets, the companies now might think twice about importing more, given the possibility of losses, said Benjamin Diokno, an economist and former budget secretary.

“The wisdom of E.O. 839 will come to its severest test once oil product supply is disrupted,” Mr. Diokno wrote in BusinessWorld, a Manila newspaper. “For the oil firms who were enticed by the downstream oil industry deregulation law, this recent E.O. is a nightmare.”

The oil companies have complied with the order, and rolled back prices. But they warned that the order might have grave consequences, among them “supply disruptions and negative impact on the investment climate in our country,” according to Roberto Kanapi, a Shell spokesman.

Even now, just days after the order was announced, the oil companies are saying that their losses stemming from the directive will be large, with Petron alone estimating a 1.5 billion-peso loss in the fourth quarter. The government has not indicated when it might lift the executive order.

Oil consumers, meanwhile, have welcomed the decree. Raul Concepcion, a Filipino industrialist who heads the nonprofit Consumer and Oil Price Watch, said the oil companies had it coming. The companies’ “predatory pricing” in the years since the Oil Deregulation Law was passed created the conditions that prompted the reimposition of price controls, he said.

“If there was total transparency in the pricing of oil products, then the oil companies would not be suspected of predatory pricing,” Mr. Concepcion said. Ralph Recto, Ms. Arroyo’s economic planning secretary, had accused the oil companies of overpricing by as much as 8 pesos per liter of gasoline, a charge the companies denied.

The companies have insisted, now and in the past, that their prices are dictated by the market. None have been prosecuted for predatory pricing, despite allegations from groups including Mr. Concepcion’s. But because prices at the pump tend to move all at once, and because the companies have refused to open their books to scrutiny, suspicion has grown among the public.

Some people are urging the government to expand the price freezes nationwide. “Why impose the price controls only in Luzon? The other islands should also be covered, especially because the price of oil in the Visayas and Mindanao are 5 to 7 pesos more expensive compared to Luzon,” said George San Mateo, secretary general of Piston, the country’s largest group of public-transport operators and drivers. Visayas and Mindanao are the two other main island groups in the archipelago.

Mr. San Mateo said he was worried that the oil companies would try to offset their losses in Luzon by overpricing in other areas — a concern shared by Mr. Recto, who recently resigned as Ms. Arroyo’s economic adviser. He said the order would “penalize” consumers in other places.

The executive order may have helped shift the political atmosphere and opened up new opportunities for opponents of deregulation. Already, there are resolutions pending in Congress seeking to repeal the 1998 law.

Satur Ocampo, a congressman, said the law “is a mistake and a burden to poor Filipinos.” It has made the oil companies abusive, he said.

“Even without the administration admitting it, and despite its adherence to deregulation, the recent price hikes have shown that the deregulation policy is a failure,” said Renato Reyes Jr., secretary general of the New Patriotic Alliance, an umbrella group of grass-roots organizations that has pushed for the repeal. “An alternative to deregulation is now in order,” he said.

Estrada Begins Unlikely Comeback in Philippines

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 28, 2009

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES — It was an improbable sight: a slightly hunched man, with a gait that suggested either his age (72) or infirmity (a bad back and knees that required replacement surgery), beating up a taller opponent no older than 30.

The older man ducked as the younger one tried to bang him with a piece of wood. He cut him down with a right to the abdomen and a left hook to the face, sending his adversary stumbling to the ground. Then another opponent got smacked in the face and kicked in the midsection with one of those bad knees. Yet another came along, and he, too, went down, crashing into a table.

“I missed doing this,” the older man, Joseph Estrada — longtime actor and onetime president of the Philippines — said moments after the director cried “Cut!” Mr. Estrada then walked toward the gate of the bus terminal where the movie was being shot and waved at the gawking crowd, which delightedly waved back. He moved closer to his fans, who giggled, hugged and kissed him, some whipping out cellphone cameras.

“Don’t forget me, okay? We will take back Malacanang!” he hollered as he clambered up the hood of a jeepney, the ubiquitous Philippine minibus. The crowd responded by chanting his moniker: “Erap! Erap! Erap!”

Malacanang is the presidential palace, and Mr. Estrada managed to stay there for less than half of his six-year term. He was driven from office in 2001, during what is now known as People Power 2, after a Senate impeachment trial on allegations of corruption — including accusations he took kickbacks from gambling lords — was cut short by attempts by Mr. Estrada’s allies to suppress evidence, sending Filipinos to the streets in protest.

Last week, Mr. Estrada announced during his party’s convention that he would run again for president in the election next year, calling it his “final, final performance.” The announcement, needless to say, flummoxed his political opponents and upset the Philippines’ already rambunctious politics.

Mr. Estrada, returning to movies after a break of more than two decades — which includes the six years he spent in prison for plunder and corruption — satisfies a lifelong passion. “I love making movies. Without the movies, there would not be a Joseph Estrada,” he said in between takes on the set of the comedy “One and Only Family.”

And returning to politics — despite his promise to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo when she pardoned him in 2007 that he would never again seek elective office — is a chance to take care of unfinished political business. In an interview on the movie set, Mr. Estrada said his decision to run again was important to him “so I can clean up my name and prove to those who removed me that they were wrong.”

Whether he can accomplish this is not clear. The Philippine Constitution prohibits a president from seeking another term. Mr. Estrada insists, however, that he was never given a chance to finish his term, so this doesn’t apply.

“I am not running for re-election,” he said. “I am running for election.”

His opponents, particularly within the Arroyo administration, vow to take the issue to the Supreme Court.

More than settling old scores, however, Mr. Estrada insists that he is acting in the interests of the nation. “I want to continue what I started,” he said.

He promised, for instance, to resume his “all-out war” against Islamic separatists and Communist insurgents. And, he added, with no hint of irony, “There is so much corruption going on now that we have to have change.”

Saddled with the corruption charges, which he continues to deny, and a legacy of misrule, which he continues to challenge, Mr. Estrada hopes to endear himself once again to Filipinos — through the movies, at least for now.

Many still adore him, but many, too, are offended not just by his audacity but also by his insistence that what happened in 2001 was an illegal coup staged by the country’s elite.

“It is only in the Philippines where a disgraced president who was ousted by a people’s uprising would dare run for the presidency again, without atoning for his past mistakes and even insisting that he did nothing wrong,” wrote Benjie Oliveros, a political columnist.

Indeed, Mr. Estrada’s assistants have been distributing a flier featuring some of the world’s most influential publications criticizing People Power 2.

“Gloria Macapagal Arroyo took over the presidency in constitutional circumstances that do not stand up well to scrutiny,” says The Economist. “People Power has become an acceptable term for a troubling phenomenon, one that used to be known as mob rule,” says Time magazine.

“They hated me so much that they never stopped demonizing me,” Mr. Estrada said, puffing on a cigarette that he tried to hide each time a photographer snapped his picture. (“I don’t want young people to see me smoking,” he said.) “They threw at me not just the kitchen sink but also the toilet bowl,” he said, chuckling, evidently pleased with his play of words. “But I never stopped being the president of this country.”

That appears true, at least on this movie set in Quezon City. He arrived with the trappings of power: in a shiny, black Lincoln Navigator, escorted by two police officers on motorcycles. The umbrella his assistant held over him bore the presidential seal. People addressed him as “presidente.” The set was Mr. Estrada’s domain, just as Malacanang had been.

In the 1950s, show business provided an escape for Mr. Estrada, who had dropped out of an engineering course. Of the 10 children in the family, Joseph Marcelo Ejercito — as he was known before he adopted the screen name Joseph Estrada — was the only one who did not graduate from college.

But, he says, he made up for it by excelling in the movies. He made more than 100 films in a career spanning three decades and won countless acting awards.

In many of these films, Mr. Estrada portrayed poor men seeking justice. Although he was never really poor, he said he “identified with these roles” and tried to plumb the depths of his characters. “I researched my roles so I understand how it is to be poor,” he said. “I have been a jeepney driver, a labor leader, a Communist guerrilla.”

These roles endeared him to Filipino voters, Mr. Estrada said, enough for them to elect him first as mayor — for 17 years — of San Juan, a suburb in Metro Manila, then as senator, vice president and finally president. He impressed nationalists when he produced and starred in “In the Claws of the Eagle,” a 1991 film that was highly critical of U.S. military bases. “I am proud to say that that movie helped in kicking out the bases,” he said.

That the movie he is making now is a comedy about a jeepney driver who gives his daughter’s boyfriend a hard time — in other words, a movie with no obvious political significance — is hardly an issue with Mr. Estrada. “I enjoy doing this, and I missed doing this,” he said. Besides, the movie, with its use of the iconic jeepney, could advance his political agenda; a movement he created, “Jeep ni Erap,” continues to recruit supporters.

After a makeup artist retouched his face, Mr. Estrada stood up and positioned himself beside a jeepney to rehearse another fight scene. With a brio that seemed somewhat at odds with his hunched figure and sagging features, he lunged at a thug, grabbed his head and slammed it on the hood of the vehicle. The director yelled “Cut!” — and Mr. Estrada, ever so slightly, pumped his fist.

Storm may be over, but trouble still brews

An outbreak of a water-borne disease in the Philippines highlights the inability of communities to cope with the storm’s aftermath.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost
Published: October 28, 2009 06:53 ET

MANILA, Philippines — Nearly a month since a tropical storm dumped unprecedented amounts of rain that flooded much of Metro Manila and its nearby provinces, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos are still suffering from its aftermath, particularly from an outbreak of a water-borne disease called leptospirosis that has killed so far 167 people and infected thousands.

Apart from leptospirosis and other diseases, tens of thousands of residents in the capital and elsewhere in Luzon, the main island north of the country, remain homeless after two storms in short succession, Ketsana then Parma, destroyed houses, properties and crops.

The Philippines isn’t new to devastation wrought by storms and typhoons, but these recent ones have been particularly crippling, especially in poorer areas. Several districts of Metro Manila remain flooded in waist-deep water, raising concerns that the leptospirosis outbreak could worsen.

Health officials have said that the outbreak of the disease is one of the largest in the world. Leptospirosis is a constant threat in flooded areas and has been made significantly worse by continual floods in the wake of Ketsana and Parma.

“This is unprecedented,” health secretary Francisco Duque III said last week. “There’s been no situation like what we have in the Philippines where within less than a month’s time we have doubled or tripled the average number of cases in a year’s time,” Duque said.

“We have also already sent an SOS to the international community because this is one of the biggest outbreaks, not just in the Philippines but in the world,” he said.

The World Health Organization estimates that as many 4,000 could be infected by leptospirosis, which is a bacterial infection caused by the urine of rats and vermins, among other mammals, in flooded areas. The disease, if untreated, can damage the kidney, among other effects. Symptoms include high fever, severe headache, muscle pain, chills, redness in the eyes, abdominal pain, jaundice, hemorrhages in skin and mucous membranes, vomiting, diarrhea and rashes.

The government estimates that as many as 1.7 million people are at “high risk” of exposure to the disease and that more than 1.2 million residents still live in inundated villages, most of them in the capital. In Pasig City, whole communities remain flooded and residents have turned their neighborhoods into canals, with gondola-like contraptions now serving as a means of transportation for many of them.

The additional problem created by the outbreak has put further strain on the already dwindling resources of the government, which has appealed to the international community for help after the typhoons destroyed millions of dollars in crops and property.

Government hospitals have not been able to cope with the rise in leptospirosis cases and, this week, the government convinced private hospitals to take in patients. The health department said it would subsidize the cost of the treatments, which can range from $100 to as much as $400, depending on the complication. For poor families who are invariably the ones most affected by the outbreak, this expense — $400 is equivalent to two months salary of a minimum wage earner — can be forbidding.

Alarmed, the World Health Organization announced last Thursday that it was sending in a team to help the Philippine government cope with the outbreak.

In many ways, the outbreak of leptospirosis and the rising incidents of illnesses — such as diarrhea, E. coli infections and skin rashes — underscore the sheer inability of the affected communities to cope with the destruction brought by the storms. For example, the continued presence of floodwater has been blamed on the clogged drainage and sewage systems of cities and towns comprising Metro Manila, many of which have slum areas where houses block waterways.

As if this were not enough, tens of thousands of residents who live in at least 500 evacuation centers may not be able to find new homes as the government, under pressure now to do something about the slum communities that are choking Metro Manila, attempts to relocate them to other areas. Kadamay, an urban-poor group, has criticized the government for forcing these residents to live in relocation sites with no viable means of livelihood.

The immediate and lingering impact of the typhoons has put further pressure on the government to find more money to finance its rehabilitation efforts. It announced last week that it would float $1.1 billion worth of bonds precisely for this purpose. But critics now say that that would only add to the country’s ballooning debts, which now stand at $51.8 billion. Interest payments alone for that debt would eat up a fourth of the country’s whole budget for 2010.

Some Filipino officials find it unconscionable that the government still insists on paying these debts — and even adding to it by borrowing more — at a time when the country needs all the resources it could gather to rehabilitate itself. They are demanding a moratorium on debt payments.

“We should request foreign lending institutions for a debt moratorium so that we can realign and use a sizeable portion of the hefty debt service fund to the projects aimed at alleviating the plight of disaster victims,” said Aquilino Pimentel Jr., a senator.

“It would be the height of insensitivity and callousness if the government continues to allocate billions toward debt servicing when the Filipino people are in desperate need for relief,” said Satur Ocampo, a congressman. “It will take years to rehabilitate the damaged areas, and it is certain that it will take much longer for the Filipinos severely affected by the calamities to get back on their feet and recover physically, emotionally and psychologically,” he said.

The administration of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has ignored such appeals and instead tried to reassure Filipinos that the government is doing its best to mitigate the impact of climate change, which has been blamed for the unusual amount of rainfall, and environmental degradation. On Friday, Arroyo signed a law, the Philippine Climate Change Act of 2009, that would put in motion programs to deal with climate change. After the signing, the President called on Filipinos to get serious about climate change.

“We will be seeing more and worse Ondoys and Pepengs in the future, if we do not start greening our ways and our environment now,” Arroyo said, referring to the local names of Ketsana and Parma.

Birth control gets a chance in Philippines

A bill to widen access wins support in Congress despite church opposition

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 25, 2009

MANILA — Gina Judilla already had three children the first time she tried to terminate a pregnancy. “I jumped down the stairs, hoping that would cause a miscarriage,” she said. The fetus survived and is now an 8-year-old boy.

Three years later, pregnant again, she drank an herbal concoction that was supposed to induce abortion. That, too, failed.

Three years ago, in another unsuccessful attempt to end a pregnancy, she took Cytotec, a drug to treat gastric ulcers that is widely known in the Philippines as an “abortion pill.”

What drove Ms. Judilla, a 37-year-old manicurist, to such extreme measures is a story familiar to many Filipino women. She and her unemployed husband are very poor, barely able to buy vitamins for their youngest child or to send more than two of their older children to school.

“When I had my third child, I swore to myself that I will never get pregnant again because I know we could not afford to have another one,” Ms. Judilla said in a recent interview inside her home in Pasig City, on the eastern outskirts of Manila.

Abortion is illegal in the Philippines, though birth control and related health services have long been available to those who can afford to pay for them through the private medical system. But 70 percent of the population is too poor and depends on heavily subsidized care through the public health system. In 1991, prime responsibility for delivering public health services shifted from the central government to the local authorities, who have broad discretion over which services are dispensed. Many communities responded by making birth control unavailable.

More recently, however, family planning advocates have been making headway in their campaign to change this. Legislation before the Philippine Congress, called the Reproductive Health and Population Development Act, would require governments down to the local level to provide free or low-cost reproductive health services — from condoms and birth control pills to tubal ligation and vasectomy. It would also mandate sex education in all schools, public and private, from fifth grade through high school.

Supporters of the bill cite urgent public health needs. A 2006 government survey found that between 2000 and 2006, only half of Filipino women of reproductive age used birth control of any kind.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit organization based in the United States that works to advance reproductive health, 54 percent of the 3.4 million pregnancies in the Philippines in 2008 were unintended. Most of these unintended pregnancies — 92 percent — resulted from not using birth control, the institute said, and the rest from birth control that failed.

These unintended pregnancies, the institute says, contributed to an estimated half-million abortions that same year, despite the ban on the procedure. Most of these abortions are done clandestinely and in unsanitary conditions. Many women resort to crude methods like those Ms. Judilla attempted.

Moreover, maternal deaths in the Philippines are among the highest in the region: 230 for every 100,000 live births, compared with 110 deaths in Thailand, 62 in Malaysia and 14 in Singapore, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

The bill’s main proponent in Congress, Representative Edcel C. Lagman, also argues the need for a check on population growth in the interest of national welfare. The Philippine population is estimated at 92 million and is growing at more than 2 percent annually, one of the highest rates in Asia. “Unbridled population growth stunts socioeconomic development and aggravates poverty,” Mr. Lagman wrote in an op-ed column in The Philippine Daily Inquirer.

But attempts to make reproductive services more broadly available met stiff resistance, leading to the defeat of several earlier bills over the past decade.

The main opposition in this overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country has come from the church and affiliated lay organizations, which say the proposed law would legalize abortion.

One organization, the Catholic Alumni United for Life, said in a position paper that the legislation would promote abortion by financing abortion-inducing drugs, and therefore “violates explicit Catholic teaching.” Bill supporters counter that the legislation says birth control pills should be made available but that these do not constitute abortion-inducing drugs.

The Rev. Melvin Castro of the Episcopal Commission on Family and Life of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines said the Catholic Church and the laity would fight the bill, if passed into law, up to the Supreme Court.

“The Constitution is very clear that the state should protect life from conception up to its natural end,” Father Castro said in an interview. “Regardless of their religion, Filipinos are God-fearing and family-loving. This bill will change that culture.”

Still, proponents of the bill are optimistic, noting that this is the first time such legislation has won the support of the House committee on health. They also cite opinion surveys that show support for the bill and hope it can be passed before Congress adjourns in June.

It seems certain that debate over the legislation will heat up with the approach of the May national elections. Father Castro said the church wanted the bill to be an election issue.

“The more time is given to all the parties concerned to debate the bill, everybody will come to realize that there is no need for it,” he said.

Already, the church has issued statements calling on Senator Benigno Aquino III, expected to be the opposition’s presidential candidate, to oppose the bill. Mr. Aquino, the son of the late president Corazon Aquino, who was extremely close to the church, has said he would not do this.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is barred from running for another term, has been sending mixed signals of late about her position. In previous statements, however, has said she would let her Catholic faith guide her. “My faith has a very, very strong influence on me,” she said in a speech last year.

Other politicians, particularly those on the local level, have chosen to side with the church. In 2000, Jose Lito Atienza, who was mayor of Manila at the time, issued an executive order ending government-financed birth control in the capital. Condoms and other contraceptives were removed from government clinics and hospitals. Patients who asked for them were turned away.

Mr. Atienza, who is now the environment secretary, defends his order as “the right thing to do.”

“Contrary to what many are saying, that policy was meant to protect women, to protect their wombs from those who want to take away life,” he said.

Passage of the reproductive health bill would automatically nullify Mr. Atienza’s order, said Clara Rita A. Padilla, executive director of EnGendeRights, a nonprofit group that supports the bill. “The poor women of this country need this law to protect them,” she said.

Some communities have taken a different approach. In 2005, Rodrigo Duterte, mayor of the southern city of Davao, offered 5,000 pesos, or roughly $100, to anyone who would undergo a vasectomy or tubal ligation. The church authorities responded by saying they would remove women’s IUDs for free.

Ms. Judilla’s community did not have the same restrictive policy as Manila — there were simply no contraceptives available when she visited the public clinic, a situation the legislation promises to change. She said she had decided against tubal ligation when she was told that she would not be able to work for a week after the surgery.

Misery and Illness Persist in Philippine Typhoons’ Wake

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 25, 2009

MANILA — A month after parts of the Philippines were devastated by successive typhoons, tens of thousands of people remain homeless and more than 150 have been killed by waterborne diseases, officials said.

Typhoon victims inside a baseball stadium turned into a temporary evacuation center in Pasig’s Rosario district, east of Manila.

Relief workers are particularly concerned about children in evacuation camps in towns and cities in the Manila metropolitan area that remain flooded.

Health officials said there was an outbreak of diseases in both evacuation centers and in flooded communities, particularly a bacterial infection called leptospirosis that had afflicted more than 2,000 residents and killed 157 as of Saturday.

Apart from leptospirosis — which is caused by urine from rats and other mammals — dengue fever, malaria, diarrhea, skin rashes and other illnesses are common. Of the 35,000 people in evacuation centers, more than half suffer from some disease, most commonly acute respiratory illness, according to the Department of Health.

Efforts to relocate survivors have had limited impact because of the refusal of some affected residents — many of them slum dwellers whose shanties were destroyed— to be uprooted from their communities. According to the government, more than 1.2 million residents still live in damaged villages in greater Manila, some of them with waist-high floodwater.

Children are particularly vulnerable, according to Diwa Gacosta, a local representative of World Vision. She said that cramped and unsanitary conditions had caused an increase in these diseases. “The impact of the flood to children’s health is really a problem,” Ms. Gacosta said Sunday.

Last week, Save the Children, another nonprofit group, issued an alert about the situation.

“Children in these storm-affected areas face a host of dangers that pose a threat to their very survival,” said Latha Caleb, the director of Save the Children in the Philippines. “It is critical now to address the lack of sanitation systems and clean water that are resulting in widespread illness and disease.”

Although both the government and the private sector are making an effort, the humanitarian crisis seems to be overwhelming, prompting President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to offer prayers last week for those affected by the calamity.

About 70,000 families in the Manila area live in shanties and huts that block waterways, exacerbating problems with drainage and sewer systems. The government no longer allows shanties to be rebuilt along these waterways; the challenge is relocating the residents.

Cities like Pasig, one of the hardest-hit with several neighborhoods still underwater, are under pressure to find ways to house thousands of survivors. Hundreds who sought refuge in a government-owned gymnasium called PhilSports Arena in Pasig were forced to leave without assurances of a viable relocation site.

According to Jon Vincent Marin, a spokesman from Kadamay, a group that advocates for the urban poor, the evacuees were forced to leave after the government stopped giving out food. City officials denied the charge. The evacuees were also given a few hundred pesos, or just a few dollars, on the condition that they leave the gymnasium, Mr. Marin said.

Ms. Arroyo began a program this month called “Back to the Provinces” to encourage people to leave the metropolis. Families are given a small amount to start over in their provinces, where most of Manila’s slum dwellers come from.

Mr. Marin criticized the government’s efforts, saying the relocation sites offer no livelihood opportunities. “Poverty and lack of livelihood are the reasons why these people come to Manila. If the government moves them to another place where they will have nothing to depend on for income, they will be forced to return,” he said.

Typhoons Hit Small Businesses in Philippines Hard

By CARLOS H.CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 14, 2009

MANILA — The back-to-back typhoons that struck the Philippines in the past three weeks have devastated the country’s small entrepreneurs — the backbone of the economy — making recovery much more difficult.

And the government is too stretched to help, economists have said, though the government is looking into the issuance of reconstruction bonds to finance typhoon relief.

The typhoons, Ketsana and Parma, not only killed more than 600 people, they destroyed infrastructure and crops worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Much of the damage was in metropolitan Manila, which contributes 40 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, and the central and northern part of Luzon, which produce more than half of the country’s rice, Filipinos’ staple food.

Although it is too early to quantify the damage to small businesses, economists say that these mom-and-pop stores, restaurants, printing presses and repair shops, among others, have been the worst hit.

Small businesses, said Luz Lorenzo, an economist at ATR-Kim Eng Securities in Manila, “will be affected the hardest primarily because most of them don’t have insurance.” To get the businesses back on their feet, these entrepreneurs will have to dip into their savings, she said.

Entrepreneurs like Kerwin Chua, owner of Printed Matter, a printing press in the Santa Mesa district of Manila, know this all too well. Typhoon Ketsana destroyed 20 million pesos, or $429,000, worth of printing equipment, most of it digital, in his shop. “We had to shut down all operations, and in the past week we have not been accepting orders and have, in fact, been refunding many,” Mr. Chua said. He said it would probably take him a year to recover from the damage, and because his business did not have insurance, he would be forced to tap his savings.

“It’s been terrible, but we know we can recover from this,” he said.

The Philippine Insurers and Reinsurers Association said last week that property claims alone could top 11 billion pesos, adding that the property damage from the typhoons was unprecedented.

Nestor Espenilla, a deputy governor of the Philippines’ central bank, has estimated that more than $10 billion in loans were at risk of default because of the storms, according to a Dow Jones report.

Ms. Lorenzo, the ATR-Kim Eng economist, said the typhoons “have erased wealth considerably across income classes. In addition to losses in crops, equipment, inventories and stocks, there is also going to be a loss in spending power.”

An overwhelming 99.7 percent of all businesses in the Philippines are classified by the Department of Trade and Industry as micro-, small and medium enterprises — all having fewer than 200 employees. The majority of these businesses are in metropolitan Manila, and in Calabarzon and Central Luzon, the two regions in Luzon that were among the worst hit by the storms.

The Ibon Foundation, a nonprofit economic research group, estimated that the first typhoon alone, Ketsana, affected 180,977 families who rely on their small businesses in Manila and the two Luzon regions.

“These families may be suffering 47.3 million pesos in forgone income every day, aside from having to face the problem of how to recover perhaps 2.7 billion pesos in capital lost,” the foundation said in a report last week.

The devastation “could cause lasting poverty and severe difficulties for the families that rely on their small businesses to survive,” Jose Enrique Africa, the Ibon Foundation’s economist and research director, said in an interview.

In the agricultural sector, also hit hard, 18.4 billion pesos worth of crops, mainly rice, has been destroyed, according to government estimates. This has forced the government to import more rice — as much as 250,000 tons — to ensure that supplies for next year are adequate. The Philippines is the world’s biggest rice importer, with a record 2.3 million tons last year.

Agriculture Secretary Arthur Yap said Wednesday that growth in the farm sector, which accounts for about a fifth of G.D.P, should slip to 0.5 percent to 1.5 percent this year, from the previous target of 3 percent to 3.5 percent, because of the typhoons, Reuters reported.

Apart from asking for more international aid, the government has not been able to do much to address the problems faced by entrepreneurs, as it has tried to manage a budget deficit that ballooned to 210 billion pesos in August — only 40 billion pesos short of its ceiling of 250 billion pesos for the whole year.

Some legislators, however, have proposed that banks place moratoriums on loan repayment and lend more to agricultural producers. President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has likewise urged insurance companies to process insurance claims quickly.

Despite the extensive typhoon damage, the government said it would not change its 2009 growth targets of 0.8 percent to 1.8 percent for G.D.P, which was $169 billion in 2008. Any reduction caused by the typhoons would be offset by strong remittances from overseas Filipino workers, who are expected to send more money to their relatives at home, not just because of the typhoons but also because of the approaching Christmas season, officials said.

But Ms. Lorenzo, the economist, said an increase in remittances would not be enough. “Remittances contribute 10 percent to the total economy,” she said. “I don’t think these can grow to 20 percent. The push is not going to offset the overall negative effect. We would be lucky if we get a 1 percent growth for the full year.”

Battered Philippines Struggles to Regain Footing

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 11, 2009

MANILA — Using picks, shovels and their bare hands, rescuers and volunteers continued Sunday to search for bodies buried by dozens of landslides in the Philippines, as the country struggled to get back on its feet after being struck by successive typhoons that have killed more than 600 people.

Filipino police tried to unearth landslide victims at a devastated area in the town of La Trinidad, Philippines, on Sunday.

The exact number of casualties from the landslides and floods caused by the last typhoon, Parma, was hard to determine.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council reported a nationwide death toll of 193 from Parma. However, it takes time for the council to confirm various regional tolls.

An estimated 222 people have died in the Cordillera Administrative Region, an inspector and spokesman for the regional police, Tessie Sarmiento, told local television.

The toll was expected to rise as rescuers searched mountainous and interior areas in the northern Philippines, where Parma lingered for a week before finally exiting the country last Friday.

“Dozens of people are still missing,” said Lt. Col. Ernesto Torres, spokesman of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, according to Reuters. “We have heavy equipment there, but our rescuers are very cautious because they are also at risk. As of now, food and relief materials can only be delivered by helicopters because it would take two to five days to clear up roads and bridges washed out by floods and landslides.”

In late September, Typhoon Ketsana battered Manila and nearby provinces, killing 337 people. Several areas affected by Ketsana remained flooded Sunday.

Parma, which first hit the Philippines on Oct. 3 but which returned on Oct. 8, damaged more than $100 million worth of crops and property. The northern Philippines, particularly central Luzon, supplies more than half of the country’s rice; Parma damaged vast tracts of paddies that were to be harvested this month. As a result, the government has announced more rice imports.

Parma has been particularly disastrous because it hit remote, mountainous areas, where use of heavy equipment is limited.

“Much of the rescue work is done manually,” said Santos Mero, deputy secretary general of the Cordillera Peoples Alliance, a nonprofit grass-roots organization that is involved in the rescue and relief operations.

The destruction has been heavy in Benguet Province, where at least six landslides were reported and where more than 150 bodies have been found.

Mr. Mero said that extensive mining in Benguet, which has been going on for a hundred years at least, exposed whole communities to danger. “Our worry now is that the next storm could unleash so much rain that it might break the tailings dams of these mining companies,” he said by telephone from Baguio City, where his group is based. “That would be the worst disaster.”

Much of Pangasinan Province, in the plains of central Luzon, was inundated by floodwater released from several dams, submerging more than a hundred villages downstream. Residents said it rained for three straight days before the release of the dam water. The government, using helicopters from both the Philippine and U.S. armed forces, has resorted to air-dropping relief supplies because of the isolation of many villages.

Parma not only flooded cities and towns; it also rendered major roads and highways impassable and destroyed several bridges that connect the provinces to the capital, Manila.

The government has called for more international aid as it strives to replenish dwindling resources.

Landslides add to toll in inundated Philippines

More fatalities feared as typhoon returns to pummel northern areas

By Carlos H. Conde
The New York Times
Published: Oct. 10, 2009

MANILA: More than 160 people have died after a series of landslides caused by Typhoon Parma buried dozens of houses in the northern Philippines, officials said Friday.

The number of fatalities is certain to rise as rescue efforts in several provinces had barely even begun on Friday.

Heavy rains brought by Parma — the downpour had been going on for three straight days in most of the areas affected — have likewise overflowed several dams, forcing the authorities to release excess water beginning on Thursday that ended up inundating dozens of towns, particularly in the plains of central Luzon, the main Philippine island in the north.

The latest calamity came just a week after Typhoon Ketsana devastated nearly all of the capital, Manila, and nearby provinces, killing nearly 300 people. Officials at relief agencies are warning of a humanitarian crisis that may be worse than the one caused by Ketsana.

Nestor Fongwan, the governor of Benguet, and Max Dalog, the governor of the Mountain Province, told local television on Friday that rescuers had retrieved a total of 143 bodies in their provinces, which are among the worst hit by the calamity. In Baguio City, 25 more people died in separate mudslides.

In one village alone, in the town of La Trinidad, Benguet Province, 41 people were killed when 34 houses were buried late Thursday, according to the police there. Town officials have likewise closed major roads for fear of more landslides.

Parma, the second typhoon to strike the Philippines in two weeks, also damaged a number of roads and bridges, effectively isolating several provinces from Manila.

Roads linking Manila to several northern provinces and Baguio City have been closed, said Amado Espino Jr., the governor of Pangasinan Province, in an interview on DZBB radio. Pangasinan, with a population of 2.7 million, was among the 21 provinces badly hit by Parma.

According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, more than 50 bridges and roads in 17 provinces have been rendered impassable as a result of flooding or landslide.

The release of water from the San Roque Dam flooded the Agno River, inundating at least 30 towns and dozens of villages downstream, officials said. The release was meant to prevent the dam from bursting, they said.

‘‘There was really heavy rain, so water had to be released from the dam, otherwise it would have been more dangerous,’’ Nathaniel Cruz, the government’s chief forecaster, told The Associated Press. ‘‘Even our office was flooded and our staff had to move to the rooftop. It’s near the river that they were monitoring.’’ Officials said the dams would continue releasing water as long as they need to.

Local officials said Friday afternoon that 90 percent of Pangasinan Province was flooded by water coming from the release at the San Roque Dam, and the water in other provinces was rising as well.

In the Pangasinan town of Villasis, floodwaters had covered the town in ankle-deep water by Thursday afternoon, prompting thousands of residents to seek higher ground or evacuate, said Lolit Santos, a resident, by telephone.

‘‘It has been raining here for three straight days and this is the first time this happened to us,’’ Mrs. Santos said, adding that she and her family might evacuate.

In the adjacent town of Carmen, she said, rising waters flooded the ground floor of the popular SM mall.

Pangasinan has been worst hit by the release of water from the six dams in central and northern Luzon. According to Sister Rosanne Mallillin, executive secretary of Caritas Philippines, the local partner of Catholic Relief Services, 19 out of the 48 towns — or 115 villages — in that province are completely underwater.

‘‘Several towns have been literally submerged and people have retreated to their rooftops, but many of them could not do that because whole houses are now underwater,’’ Sister Mallillin said.

She said hundreds of families have evacuated to schools, gyms and even churches to escape the flood, which was worsened by the collapse of two dikes in the province.

‘‘This is unprecedented. Continuous rains of the successive typhoons have put so much pressure on the dams and the dikes,’’ Sister Mallillin said. ‘‘This is worse than what happened in Manila.’’

More than a million people have been dislocated or otherwise affected by the storm, officials said.

The defense secretary, Gilbert Teodoro, who also heads the National Disaster Coordinating Council, asked for help from the United States on Friday to deal with the calamity in the north. He said the Harpers Ferry, an amphibious dock landing ship, was on its way Friday to Lingayen Gulf, in Pangasinan, to help in the rescue effort.

Parma first made landfall in the Philippines last Saturday, a week after Ketsana battered the Manila metropolitan area and nearby provinces, killing 288 people.

Earlier this week, after a two-day onslaught, Parma began moving off, but another smaller storm, Melor, pulled it back. And it has not left.

Danger lingers in Philippines

Even with storms gone, flood-related illnesses are rising as supplies shrink

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 7, 2009

MANILA — More than a week after Typhoon Ketsana devastated the Philippines, large areas of the Manila metropolitan area and nearby provinces remain flooded, and residents face a host of other problems brought about by the lingering effects of the storm, according to relief and government officials.

Nearly half a million people were affected by flooding caused by Ketsana, with hundreds of thousands displaced, many of whom are now in evacuation centers, while others remain marooned in homes surrounded by floodwaters. Several areas will probably have no power for weeks, officials say.

The high floodwaters and uncollected debris, especially in hard-to-reach areas, have resulted in higher numbers of illnesses such as diarrhea, skin diseases, coughs and colds, according to relief agencies and the health department. The spread of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry, such as dengue fever and malaria, has also become a serious concern, they say.

While efforts are under way to alleviate the suffering of survivors, supplies and funding for relief operations are disappearing fast, prompting the United Nations to appeal to other countries for help, saying that the Philippines needs an additional $74 million to cope with the disaster.

The food supply is also under threat. Ketsana and another typhoon, Parma, that hit the Philippines over the weekend destroyed $128 million worth of crops, mostly rice, and the government has said it will have to import more rice to replenish stocks for next year.

Ketsana and Parma killed more than 300 people and damaged an estimated $57 million worth of property and infrastructure in addition to the damage to agriculture, according to the National Disaster Coordinating Council. In addition, many workers have been kept away from their jobs, according to Ibon Foundation, a nonprofit economic research group. The disaster “could cause lasting poverty and severe difficulties” for those affected, particularly the poor, the group said.

For the moment, the government and aid organizations are focusing on distributing relief goods — food, water, medicine, clothing — before tackling the clearance of debris and the rebuilding of infrastructure and homes. This means that it will take weeks, probably even months, for victims of the flooding to get back on their feet. The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority said it would take at least two months to clean the capital of tons of debris.

But funds and aid are in short supply.

The World Food Program, the United Nations agency, estimates that it alone would need $26 million more for its relief operations. Stephen Anderson, its country director for the Philippines, said it might be tougher now to get funds because of recent disasters in other countries like Indonesia, Vietnam and Samoa. “The donor community is stretched,” he said.

Mr. Anderson visited the town of Santa Cruz, in Laguna Province, south of Manila, over the weekend and saw whole communities still flooded and people choosing to remain in their inundated homes instead of in evacuation centers.

“The water was not receding,” Mr. Anderson said. “Clearly, there will be issues brought about by the water being stagnant,” he added. “We have to move quickly.”

Luc Picard, representative to the Philippines for Catholic Relief Services, said that the biggest problem facing the relief effort was the health of the survivors.

Children are particularly vulnerable in such situations, said Cherry Marcelo of the relief and charity group World Vision, whose projects include the creation of “child-friendly spaces” where child survivors are provided extra care — as well as protection against child abuse. “After a disaster, children are more vulnerable. In evacuation centers, where a lot of people all live together in one area, they need to be protected,” Ms. Marcelo said.

Mr. Anderson, of the World Food Program, said a major part of the effort now was to provide the equipment not just to move the trash but also to reach survivors who remained in their homes in remote places. He said two helicopters were to arrive on Wednesday to help in the program’s efforts as well as boats from Italy.

An area of concern for relief and rescue operations right now are the communities around the Laguna Lake, where water levels have not significantly decreased since the storm. Many of the towns surrounding the bay still have chest-deep water, Mr. Anderson said. “That’s the big challenge because of the people that are staying there. At some point, they will have to be relocated.”

On Monday, officials said that they would prohibit the rebuilding of the huts that used to block the waterways of the Manila metropolitan area, which officials say were a major reason why the floodwater rose so fast and hardly decreased in many areas. The illegal dumping of garbage and other waste has also been cited as a major reason for the blockage of waterways that were designed to ease flooding.

Jose Atienza, the environment secretary, said mayors of the 17 towns and cities that comprise Metro Manila should be sued for violating the country’s law on proper waste disposal. “They have allowed this pollution to happen, and that is why they have to answer for it,” Mr. Atienza said in an interview.

The disaster and its aftermath are prompting the government to rethink its policies and programs on disaster management, said Gilbert Teodoro, the secretary of defense, who also heads the National Disaster Coordinating Council.

“After the emotions will have subsided, we have to give an honest-to-goodness look at our systems, look at our infrastructure and determine areas where we can improve,” Mr. Teodoro said in an interview Tuesday. “There’s no choice, or people will suffer.”

Mr. Teodoro said that one of the proposals he was supporting was legislation that would allow town and city mayors to spend more money on disaster management, rather than wait for the national government to step in.

And because the armed services are almost always the first to get tapped to respond to disasters, there is a need to “reprioritize” a pending bill in Congress to modernize the Philippine military, he said. “The question now is, How much resources would we sacrifice that would go to capacity building in terms of disaster response?” Mr. Teodoro said. “It’s a judgment call.”

Ripple effect of typhoon Ketsana deals poor a double whammy

For thousands of Filipinos with no homes and nowhere to rebuild, the hardship of the storm has only just begun.

By Carlos H. Conde
GlobalPost.com
Published: October 7, 2009 06:45 ET

MANILA, Philippines — These days, Danilo Fabre spends his time asking friends and neighbors where to look for cheap wood. His home, a hovel right beside a creek in a district called West Kamias, in Quezon City, was completely demolished by typhoon Ketsana, which struck the Philippines on Sept. 26, inundating nearly all of the capital of Manila.

With their homes gone and with his community — a shantytown right beside the creek — still struggling to put their lives back together after the disaster, Fabre can be found on most days either lining up for relief goods from government and charity organizations or sitting by the curb, chatting with friends, exchanging tales of those harrowing days of deluge.

“I pity my youngest,” Fabre, 46, said in an interview. “She’s still so small and now we have nothing, not even milk to feed her.” The baby, at barely one year old, is the youngest among his five children.

All across Metro Manila, the region composed of 17 towns and cities that was the hardest hit by Ketsana, similar tales of woe now ring familiar among the poor.

There’s Danny Regenio, a 45-year-old car painter with five children whose home in Tatalon, another poor district also in Quezon City, was flooded and razed by a raging fire at the same time. “It was just the worst thing,” he said, recalling how he and his neighbors clambered up to their roofs in order to evade the flood and the fire.

There are Fabre’s neighbors who lived in huts beneath a bridge and who are now homeless. Although some huts remain nearby, it wasn’t the same as it used to be, said Fabre. “We were poor but we were all together and we were happy,” he said. Now, even the nightly wailing of the videoke bar nearby is gone.

In Pasig City, another Metro Manila city, mothers complained about not being able to send their sick children to the public hospitals, which are still closed because of the flood. When another typhoon, Parma, struck the northern Philippines over the weekend, sending rains on Metro Manila, residents of a district beside the Pasig River panicked, thinking that another flooding was on the way. Thankfully, Parma was not as devastating as many had feared, though the rain brought ankle-deep water to the homes of many of the poor in many sections of the city.

As in the past, what Ketsana underscored is the extreme vulnerability of poor Filipinos to calamities. According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, the typhoon affected 629,466 families or 3,084,997 individuals. According to the government, Ketsana killed 288 people while 18 died due to Parma.

Today, more than a week since it wrought havoc by dumping an unprecedented amount of rain on Manila and its environs, thousands of Filipinos have not been able to even remove the trash and debris that accumulated around them, exposing them even more to diseases and illnesses.

While the government, with the help of countless NGOs, charity organizations and even the United Nations, has been trying its best to respond to the needs of the poor, these remain largely unmet. As a result, the U.N. on Monday appealed to the international community for more help, as much as $74 million.

And now, according to Defense Secretary Gilbert Teodoro’s Monday announcement, the government is prohibiting slum dwellers from rebuilding their shanties on waterways. As a result, Metro Manila’s poor are faced with the real problem of where to rebuild their lives. Prior to Ketsana, the government recorded 70,000 families that had illegally built their homes on these canals, creeks and bridges. Many had their homes destroyed by the typhoon, while many remain.

But relocation seems imminent at this point, with everybody — from government officials to geographers — now proclaiming that removing those shanties as well as the garbage that clogs Metro Manila’s drainage system should be a priority.

Teodoro, who also chairs the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said in an interview that the structures that constrict the waters are the reasons why floodwaters remain in many parts of the capital more than a week after the disaster.

Jose Lito Atienza, the environment secretary, agrees and said, in a separate interview, that “the first thing that should be done now is to remove the garbage and those structures.” He threatened to sue any mayor in Metro Manila who will defy such a move, saying that these local executives have allowed the garbage to accumulate in the first place.

Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement), the country’s largest labor group, cautioned the government on Tuesday against arbitrarily demolishing these shantytowns without viable relocation plans for those affected.

“We agree that flood-prone areas should be vacated and that these are not fit for human residence in the first place. Even poor people say so. We believe, however, that the best way to leave these spaces vacant is to create new homes for our urban poor,” said Elmer Labor, chairman of the Kilusang Mayo Uno, in a Tuesday statement.

Pamalakaya, a group of fisherfolk, criticized the government for even thinking about removing the houses of poor residents around the Laguna Lake, where floodwater had accumulated and spilled over into several communities. The forced eviction, said Salvador France, vice chairman of Pamalakaya, would displace “100,000 lakeshore residents mostly small fishermen and poor people who have been living in Laguna Lake surroundings for generations.”

According to the nonprofit economic think tank Ibon Foundation, Ketsana “could cause lasting poverty and severe difficulties” to the majority of the families it affected.

“They will face greatly increased expenses for housing, housing repair, medical care, education and personal effects. Among the critical spending they may be forced to cut back on to accommodate these is on food with corresponding adverse nutritional and health implications,” the foundation said.

It added that “among the most affected areas are urban poor communities which have high concentrations of informal sector work and, hence, of families in insecure and particularly vulnerable livelihoods.”

To residents like Fabre, all this sounds like they have been dealt a double whammy. “If they are going to remove us here, where would we go?” he asked. Many of those who suffered like him are probably asking the same question.

After Ignoring its Infrastructure, Philippines Pay a Deadly Price

By CARLOS H. CONDE
The New York Times
Published: October 4, 2009

MANILA — “Our house used to be there,” Evangeline Perdito said, pointing at a spot on the underside of a small concrete bridge. Below, several naked children played in the murky creek whose banks were lined with trash and filth.

There is nothing left beneath the bridge now. When Typhoon Ketsana hit the Philippines last week, it flooded Metro Manila, the administrative region of the capital, and the water in the creek rose so high that it washed away Ms. Perdito’s home, along with the others.

Shantytowns have been identified as a major factor behind the heavy toll wrought by Ketsana: nearly 300 people dead and parts of the capital flooded a week after the storm.

Soon after, a second storm, Typhoon Parma, hit a remote part of the northeastern Philippines. It moved out to sea on Sunday after killing 16 people, the government said.

The storms highlighted the dismal state of infrastructure in the Philippines, as well as a lack of equipment to deal with emergencies in a country that is hit by about 20 typhoons and major storms every year, experts say.

Metro Manila’s old drainage and sewage systems are being choked by shantytowns and the garbage they generate. Even the Manggahan Floodway, which was built in the early 1980s to ease the flooding of the metropolis by diverting floodwater to Manila Bay, is blocked by huts, fishponds and thick growths of a vegetable called kangkong, or water spinach.

The Philippines is prone to landslides, volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. But, the experts say, it is also one of the most ill-prepared and ill-equipped countries to deal with disasters.

The country’s weather bureau does not have a Doppler radar, which could measure precipitation and provide a more accurate reading of coming weather disturbances. The bureau has sought funding to buy at least five of these radars, but they will not be delivered until December.

Ms. Perdito, her husband, Jesse, and their six children had been living under the bridge in Quezon City, one of the cities that make up the Metro Manila region, since 1992, in a small shantytown of about 20 huts.

There are many other people living under bridges like this one across Metro Manila, an agglomeration of 17 cities and towns bulging with more than 12 million people. Families like the Perditos hoping to escape the poverty of the provinces have put up huts anywhere they can — under flyovers, in sewage creeks and on riverbanks and breakwaters.

Even in normal times the infrastructure falls short. Ninoy Aquino International Airport, which serves the capital, is incapable of ensuring a continuous power supply for the air traffic control system; in September, a power outage cut off communication between pilots and air traffic controllers, forcing several planes to make U-turns in midair.

All of this has frustrated advocates pressing to improve the situation.

“We’ve been knocking on doors, telling policy makers that earthquakes are the biggest threats to Manila, but they are too distracted to pay attention,” said Dr. Fouad Bendimerad, an American engineer and risk management adviser who heads the Manila-based Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative. Mr. Bendimerad said his group came up with a “disaster risk management master plan” for Manila in 2007, but the plan was never implemented for lack of funding.

“It’s difficult to gather consensus and to get attention because what’s happening is, we are constantly reacting to the disasters that are happening,” Mr. Bendimerad said by telephone from Bangkok. “We are always in reaction mode, and that takes away all the resources.”

Herminia Francisco, director of the Economy and Environment Program for Southeast Asia of the Ottawa-based International Development Research Center, cautioned that disasters like Ketsana do “not happen only once” and urged the Philippine government to “bite the bullet” and give serious thought to one-time investments to develop basic infrastructure.

Ms. Francisco said improving Metro Manila’s drainage and sewer system should be a priority.

The Asian Development Bank, along with the World Bank’s International Finance Corp., is financing a 15-year project by the capital’s two water concessionaires, Manila Water and Maynilad, to improve the collection and treatment of waste water. But the biggest challenge in improving Manila’s infrastructure or even to make sure that the existing ones function properly is political and probably cultural, experts say.

Anthony Golez, the vice chairman of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said the national government was committed to improving Metro Manila’s infrastructure and to making the city more orderly and prepared for disasters.

“But local governments must give the national government a picture of what things needed to be rebuilt, what things are needed to be in place,” he said. He added that, in the case of Ketsana, the storm simply overwhelmed the infrastructure. “Let me put it this way: we were prepared for an Intensity 7 earthquake, but Intensity 8 came.”

While local governments of the cities in Metro Manila have been implementing better waste collection systems and have begun campaigns to encourage people to dispose of their garbage properly, large sections of the metropolis still are littered with garbage, both uncollected and thrown just about anywhere by residents. “The fact that drainage is not periodically and regularly maintained is the main problem, but the fact that citizens throw their garbage anywhere they choose degrades the system even farther,” said Arjun Thapan, director-general of the Asian Development Bank’s Southeast Asia department.

Metro Manila has also been choking on garbage over the years. According to the ADB, the capital generates more than 6,700 tons of trash per day, and only 700 of those are recycled, while the rest are thrown into the capital’s dumpsites or dumped illegally on private lands, rivers, creeks, even into the Manila Bay, which is already biologically dead.

Meliton B. Juanico, a geographer and environmental planner at the University of the Philippines, said that the lack of political will meant that rules were often unenforced by the government. He pointed to the approval of housing and development projects in unauthorized areas such as the slopes of the Sierra Madre in Rizal Province, south of Manila, one of the areas worst hit by Ketsana.

Clearing waterways by relocating slum dwellers would require considerable political will, Mr. Juanico said. But he said that mayors of the cities of Metro Manila were reluctant to demolish slums for fear of alienating voters.

Poor Filipinos like Evangeline Perdito feel they should not be blamed for the troubles of Metro Manila. The real culprits, she said, are poverty and a lack of employment and opportunities.

“Who would want to live under this bridge?” she said. “We don’t, but where would we go? We cannot go back to the province because there’s nothing for us there.” The Perditos come from Samar, a province in the central Philippines that is among the poorest in the country.

For now, Ms. Perdito spends her days after the storm looking for scraps of wood to rebuild her shanty under the bridge. “It’s not pretty, and it can be dangerous,” she said, “but it’s home.”