Struggling With Development

The Politics Of Hunger And Gender In The Philippines

Lynn Kwiatkowski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813334080
• eBook ISBN: 9780429976704
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Struggling with Development is a study of the complex relationships among international development, hunger, and gender in the context of political violence in the Philippines. This ethnography demonstrates that gender-specific international development, which has among its main goals the alleviation of hunger in women and children and the raising

1
Introduction

Malnutrition and unequal access to food remain as severe problems in most non-industrialized countries, despite development intervention in these countries for almost a century.¹ In this book, I will analyze the problem of malnutrition primarily in relation to gender and development ideology and practices in upland Ifugao communities, located on Northern Luzon island of the Philippines. My aim, based upon research conducted primarily in the early 1990s, is to show how western derived and oriented biomedical and international development programs, as historically specific cultural forces, have not substantially alleviated malnutrition in the Philippines.² Instead, the programs have more often ignored and perpetuated or extended social structures of inequality (particularly socioeconomic, gender, and ethnic inequality) that are the fundamental causes of malnutrition. While structures of inequality operated on the local level within Ifugao, each was influenced by those operating at national and international levels (such as social class, international economic relationships, etc.).

Gender inequality was not ignored in Ifugao, but rather focused on by some development organizations through their programs during the early 1990s. Some of the development programs resulted in adverse effects for women, even when they expressly tried to improve women’s position in society. Simultaneous attempts by Philippine national biomedical and international development programs to raise women’s social status and to alleviate malnutrition in Ifugao had not been highly successful since they largely ignored the social relations of power influencing these problems.³ I will explore these propositions by analyzing biomedical and international development discourse and practices in Ifugao society in relation to gender, political violence, religion, and women’s experience of malnutrition within their families and communities. I argue against the recent drive for the inclusion of women in international development programs, in light of their ineffectiveness and, in some cases, adverse effects on peoples they intended to benefit.

To understand the complexity of the social relations that influence malnutrition, I assess how diverse unequal power relations—including gender, economic, religious, government, biomedical, political, and international (i.e., colonial, neocolonial, and development)—interrelated, supported, or contradicted each other as they operated within and outside of Ifugao. I also address how they influenced the nutritional status of Ifugao people. Development personnel often ignored the complexity of unequal social relations operating within local communities The personnel tended to focus on instituting projects that were usually politically and culturally decontextualized. Development agents at the planning level often advocated quick, technological fixes for social problems, usually serving the political and economic interests of donor governments.

Malnutrition is broadly defined here to be “the deterioration of health status and or social and productive performance of individuals arising from an intake of food either too low in quantity, or of the wrong kind, or both” (Jonsson 1981:2). Malnutrition is the biomedical understanding of hunger, which specifies and differentiates among the various nutrients needed for a well sustained mind and body. Biomedicine delineates different forms of hunger. In the biomedical construction, malnutrition is commonly a condition derived from poverty, as well as basic food and nutrient deprivation, or a result of illness causing malnutrition (such as loss of nutrients with continuous diarrheal episodes). But rarely does the biomedical construction of malnutrition include an analysis of malnutrition as one tragic and continuing outcome of processes of power and exploitation operating on international, national, and local community levels.

Related to this, I address the power of state supported and directed biomedicine, as well as other private biomedical organizations in Ifugao, to exert a dominant role in Ifugao people’s attempts to alleviate malnutrition. This analysis includes an examination of the dialectical relationship between the Philippine state and biomedicine in the Philippines. In addition, the Philippine government’s western derived, biomedical health care program joined with international development and aid organizations in an attempt to alleviate malnutrition. In looking at this relationship, I address how biomedicine is a part of the global system of power relations (Doyal and Pennell 1981; Baer, Singer and Johnsen 1986). Biomedicine ideally operates through ideologies of individualism and the superiority of technological and scientific knowledge and progress. Biomedicine is a reflection of the social ideological model of the larger society. Through biomedical ideology and practice, the individual body is the focus of (mainly physical) treatment, rather than the rectification of social relations producing ill health (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987; Baer, Singer and Johnsen 1986).

Biomedicine’s influence on malnutrition and the institutionalization of biomedicine in Ifugao society must be understood in the context of the economic, political, and social conditions within Ifugao. Malnutrition is generated and reproduced through conflicts and tensions among different social groups and classes, which can appear in all arenas of society, including medical, gendered, state, political, religious, etc. (Navarro 1986). The perpetuation of malnutrition, despite biomedical and international development practices, is due in large part to their maintenance of an unequal sociopolitical order. It involves the view that social problems are best resolved by a social evolutionary “progress” of societies toward industrialization, macro-level economic growth, development, technologization, and westernization. In this paradigm, western industrialized countries were models to be aspired to and arrived at through modern technological, scientific, and “democratic” development practices in the Philippines. Instead of resolving social problems through international development, however, development institutions and practices often maintain social inequality, effected in large measure through the power of western states to plan and manage the lives of non-western peoples through development, aid (Escobar 1995, 1988), and biomedical ideology and practices, for economic and political gain.

Changes brought about through development programs, appearing on the surface to be positive or progressive, often reinforce some of the existing problems or create new problems for the people on whom changes were imposed. The hegemony of the western development paradigm in Ifugao, viewed by development agents and many Ifugao people as an inevitable and beneficial process of social change, was a function of the power invested in dominant forms of knowledge (Escobar 1995; Foucault 1990) imposed upon the Filipino people through centuries of colonialism and neocolonialism.⁴ The view of development as being progressive became widely accepted in the Philippines, though not without resistance or reinterpretation (Cordillera Peoples Alliance 1993; Kerkvliet 1990; Drucker 1988; Ileto 1988).

Ifugao Society

I entered Ifugao for the first time in 1984 as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was struck by their poverty and the remoteness of the villages, set deep in the Cordillera mountains of central Northern Luzon island. I was also impressed by the generosity and warmth of Ifugao people, despite their economic insecurity. At the time, I had hoped to contribute to the “development” of their community. Only later did I realize that international development was one of many powerful forces impinging on their lives and maintaining a state of poverty for the majority.

For Ifugao people, the word “Ifugao” designated the name of their ethno-linguistic group, province, and language. Ifugao was most commonly known for its remarkable rice terraced mountainsides, involving extensive irrigation systems running throughout the mountains. Largely an agricultural society, Ifugao had been integrated into the Philippine state market economy since at least the turn of the century. This integration generated widespread social changes in every area of Ifugao life, including economic, political, gendered, religious, and educational.

Certain Ifugao cultural norms and traits persisted, however, with some alteration over time. These traits included the strength of the Ifugao bilateral kinship system, bilateral inheritance, values and practices associated with the local Ifugao cosmology, some cultural constructs of gender roles, the use of prayer to cure illness, and livelihood activities. These cultural traits were supplemented with, and in some cases overriden by, modern technologies, beliefs, and social structures, such as those found in biomedicine, Christianity, and state political structure. The majority of contemporary Ifugao people had been exposed to national and international processes and events through government, radio, development agents, travel, and—for some—newspapers, television, video, outmigration, and discussions with international tourists.

PHOTO 1.1 “Native” and “modern” houses dot the terraced mountainsides of Ifugao Province.

Agricultural production and small animal husbandry remained the primary sources of livelihood for the majority of Ifugao residents. Agricultural work was conducted largely through traditional practices, although some areas made use of water buffalo and plows. In most areas, plowing was accomplished using a spade. However, many business and salaried positions also were occupied by Ifugao people, and the development of some areas of Ifugao as popular tourist spots for tourists generated a modest tourist industry of hotels and restaurants, as well as craft production and trade. Wood carving of decorative objects and weaving of textiles and baskets were crafts practiced in Ifugao. Most wood carvings were intended for export to foreign countries. Some municipalities had small but thriving market centers, but most had none. All municipalities had a few small shops from which canned and dry goods could be purchased (commonly called sari-sari stores), and there were weekly fresh market days in some municipal centers.

PHOTO 1.2 “Native” one room houses historically have been built in close proximity to each other.

The Ifugao residential pattern outside of municipality centers consisted of small clusters of houses (some traditional and some modern) scattered throughout the mountains. Residence was usually ambilocal, although increasing rates of outmigration due to population growth and limited employment opportunities recently had altered this pattern of residence. Ifugao local religion consisted of a highly developed mixture of polytheism, mythology, and belief in ancestral and other spirits (Barton 1919:3). Despite the tremendous impact of modernization, religion and ritual—whether local or Christian—were still integral aspects of everyday life for most Ifugao people, as they were important components of agriculture, healing, marriage, death, birth, and other life cycle events.

Ifugao people had contact with a number of outsiders who generated differing degrees of cultural change. Trade had transpired in Ifugao for many centuries, including early trade with nearby villagers, members of lowland ethnic groups, and Chinese and Japanese traders. By the mid-nineteenth century the Ifugao area was infiltrated by the Spanish. Foreign missionaries had visited Ifugao since Spain’s colonization of the Philippines. The American colonizers occupied Ifugao for about forty-five years. Contemporary Ifugao people had contact with other Filipino peoples, as well as people from many parts of the world.

PHOTO 1.3 Markets and some tourist establishments have emerged during the twentieth century in the central barrios, or poblacions, of Ifugao municipalities.

Although the Spanish colonizers tried to administer the Ifugao people, Ifugao was incorporated formally into a state system during the American occupation. Becoming a national province in 1966, Ifugao in the early 1990s was a province of the Cordillera Administrative Region of the national government. It was composed of ten municipalities. It had to abide by national laws, as well as regional, provincial, and municipal. Ifugao was represented by one Congressman in the national Congress. Its local provincial government system was composed of a governor, vice governor, provincial board (Sangguniang Panlalawigan), and provincial government agencies. Governing at the local municipal level were mayors, vice mayors, municipal councils (Sangguniang Bayan), other municipal government agencies, and barrio (barrios, or villages, are a subdivision of a municipality) captains. In 1992 and 1993, security in Ifugao Province included both the local police and the national military, which had stationed a battalion in Ifugao to fight Filipino Communist rebels, known as the New People’s Army (NPA). Thus, Ifugao was well incorporated into the Philippine state and its modern political system.

During the last ninety years, economic and cultural development activities have increased in Ifugao. An educational system was established by the American occupiers in the early part of this century, requiring all Ifugao children to attend formal schools, although this requirement was not always enforced. In recent years government and private biomedical services have been available in all Ifugao municipalities, though their services, technology, and medical supplies were limited at the time of my research.

Ifugao municipalities were somewhat modernized in their centers; but outside the centers, infrastructure and services in the barrios were limited. Most homes had no running water, electricity, or toilets. Food generally was cooked over firewood, although a small percentage of Ifugao people used gas stoves. There were very few roads in Ifugao, so most travel was accomplished on foot. Health conditions were poor; and malnutrition was prevalent, especially among children and women.

The average family size was about six to eight members. There were few employment opportunities, so although parents and elder siblings strived to send their children and siblings to college, many Ifugao college graduates had difficulty finding employment either inside or outside of Ifugao. When college graduates returned to Ifugao, most did not want to work in the farms since they considered such labor to be below their new educational status. In modern Ifugao society, with increasing prices of commodities and services, agricultural families have had to develop numerous work strategies to earn enough cash to survive. Nonetheless, most Ifugao families continued to live below the poverty line in the early 1990s.

Ifugao people had experienced conditions of war for decades, including tribal wars and headhunting expeditions. The region witnessed Spanish and American colonization, World War II, and the contemporary low intensity conflict (LIC) fought between the Philippine government and Communist New Peoples Army revolutionaries.

Hunger in the Philippines and Ifugao

Using biomedical constructions of hunger and malnutrition, it was estimated that in 1991 70 percent of Filipino people experienced some form of malnutrition, and 72 percent of Philippine households were unable to afford food that would meet minimum recommended dietary requirements (IBON Databank 1991:16; Tan 1991:15).⁵ The percentage of malnourished Filipino people had been slowly rising: in 1982, 67 percent of the people were malnourished in the Philippines, and in 1987, 69.2 percent of the people were malnourished (UNICEF 1990b:32). While figures cited for child malnutrition vary, some scholars estimate that by the early 1990s as many as 70 to 80 percent of Filipino children under six years old exhibited varying degrees of malnutrition (Chant and McIlwaine 1995). Fifty percent of pregnant Filipino women were cited as having anemia during the same period (Chant and McIlwaine 1995). In 1991 almost half of all Filipino people lived below the poverty level defined by the Philippine governm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Developing Hunger in the Philippines
• 3 Gendered Experiences in Ifugao
• 4 Violence and Uncertainty
• 5 Spirituality and Hunger
• 6 Interpreting Hunger Biomedically
• 7 Maintaining Inequality
• 8 Power and Contradiction: Unlikely Alliances
• 9 Conclusion
• Glossary
• List of Acronyms
• Bibliography
• Index