Tacloban City and the rest of the typhoon-ravaged places in Regions 6, 7 and 8 must be rehabilitated and rebuilt based on a framework designed to enhance the people’s capacity to survive calamities and to live a secure and dignified life.
A new community model must be built out of the ruins of Supertyphoon “Yolanda.” Decent employment must be a top priority since it is regular income that gives people a sense of long-term security and a life of dignity.
The private sector to which the government completely relies on to generate jobs is not capable, prior to and after Yolanda, of providing employment to the people of these regions. Therefore the rehabilitation plan must include a medium- to long-term public employment program where the state plays the lead role.
Such a program may include social service activities such as healthcare, climate-resilient mass housing projects, education and skills training, as well as building new, smart and renewable power and transport systems that would create green jobs, among others.
If Yolanda is the “new normal” vis-à-vis climate change and vis-à-vis the prospect of 20 Yolandas a year, the government must not follow the normal mode of asking, repacking and delivering relief goods from northern countries. There must be a shift—from relief operations to building prepared and secured communities.
The northern countries whose high carbon emissions produce many Yolandas in the Pacific must be made to pay for a climate debt they owe to poor nations like the Philippines. The compensation coming from them must be used to build a new kind of community.
Unfortunately our country is still under the rule of the ilustrado class whose vision of the country cannot go beyond the insular demand of their pockets. It is clear that the national and local governments’ failure to respond to Yolanda is the failure of trapo politics. On the 150th birth anniversary of working class hero Andres Bonifacio, it is time to renew the national hero’s struggle for national freedom and social justice in the present context of neoliberal globalization and climate crisis.

Source: Philippine Daily Inquirer - December 3, 2013