Consumers Domain
Illegitimate toxic debt
"The biggest shortage of all is the shortage of common sense."
--unknown
Let us say you got yourself a new home appliance and promise to pay P500 per month for five years. After a few months however, you discovered that the appliance was defective. What would you do? Would you still continue paying your monthly installment?
The answers to the questions above seem to be obvious. You don't need a great deal of common sense to figure that out. However it seems that for the government that is a very complicated situation.
In 1996, The Philippine government entered into a loan agreement with government of Austria that involves an equivalent of P500 million. This loan financed the DOH's project dubbed as "The Austrian Project for the Establishment of Waste Disposal Facilities and Upgrading of the Medical Equipment Standard in DOH Hospitals."
The Philippine government agreed to pay $2 million annually starting 2002 up to 2014. This translates to an additional annual debt payment of almost P100 Million peso for the Filipino taxpayers.
In line with this deal, medical waste incinerators were installed in 26 DOH-run hospitals throughout the country in 1997 to 1998.
Test however showed that the incinerator units are of substandard quality, as it did not meet emission levels guaranteed by the supplier.
In 2003 all these incinerator units were retired to comply with the incineration ban as stipulated in the Clear Air Act (CAA) law that was passed in Congress in 1999.
A subsequent assessment of the incinerators' emissions, jointly conducted by the DOH and the World Health Organization (WHO), revealed that these incinerators emit extremely high pollution.
According to an EcoWaste Coalition researcher: "Even if the incineration ban of the CAA never took effect, the incinerators' emissions were outrageously high there was simply no way to defend them. In the joint DOH-WHO emission test conducted on one of the incinerators, the dioxin emission was a whopping 870 times the limit set by the CAA."
It turns out that this type of incinerators are actually junk pieces that would not even be allowed to operate in Austria because of the pollution these units emit.
This issue was brought to the public attention weeks ago by different advocacy NGOs: Ecological Waste Coalition of the Philippines (EcoWaste), Freedom from Debt Coalition (FDC) and Greenpeace.
These groups call for the repudiation of this loan they dubbed as "toxic debt" as indeed this is tantamount to financing our own demise. We are spending for something that contributed to the destruction of our environment.
Well it is not as if this is an isolated case but the sad thing is that this has been happening left and right since the time of Marcos. The Filipino people have been made to shoulder the burden for paying for debts that did not benefit them, that did not benefit the nation -- but only stuffed the pockets of several individuals and corporations.
We are all familiar with the classic example we call the BNPP (Bataan Nuclear Power Plant). You don't need to look far actually. Here in Iloilo, we have the Pavia Housing Project. Despite clear evidence of fraud and use of substandard materials in these projects our government leaders would rather look the other way and continue to spend the people's money in paying these same projects.
Indeed, Voltaire is right -- common sense is not that common.
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