Demographic and Economic Aspects of Poverty in the Rural Philippines

Abstract

Poverty in Southeast Asia has been analyzed in numerous ways (squatters, high population densities, dietary deficiencies, war, disease, etc.) though there has been no single systematic work which attempts to delineate all socio-economic and political forces which create the evolution of rural poverty. Although rural poverty in Southeast Asia is widespread and in most ways represents poverty in its most acute form, I am purposely not dealing with povertyper se. My aim is to discuss how regional, economic and population factors such as types of cultivation and labor requirements influence the variety and intensity of rural poverty in the rural Philippines. In particular the hypothesis under investigation is that where a landscape is economically committed to a single cropping activity (such as an export crop) which is highly labor intensive, the worse aspects of rural poverty commonly emerge. Furthermore, where a regional landscape is characterized by a diversity of agricultural patterns—some labor intensive crops, some capital intensive crops—the scale and character of rural poverty is of a different order or at least of a different magnitude.