Deputy Speaker LRay Villafuerte has said that the P1.5-trillion countryside infrastructure spending measure green-lighted by the social amelioration cluster of the House’s Defeat COVID-19 Committee (DCC) is guaranteed to create a multitude of employment opportunities especially in rural areas to partly make up for the jobs that were lost amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Villafuerte said the swift congressional approval of House Bill (HB) No. 6709, or the COVID-19 Unemployment Reduction Economic Stimulus (CURES) Act of 2020, will help ease the pressure on the Duterte administration to create hundreds of thousands of jobs this year, now that the COVID-19 crisis has displaced—according to the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE)—almost 2.76 million workers as more than 102,000 establishments have closed shop or adopted flexible work arrangements since the imposition of lockdowns nationwide.
“A major government effort is needed to create a significant number of jobs in rural areas via accelerated infrastructure investments.”
Villafuerte co-chairs with Ormoc City Rep. Lucy Torres Gomez the DCC social amelioration cluster that recently approved HB 6709 in support of President Duterte’s Balik Probinsya, Bagong Pag-Asa program, which—according to the National Housing Authority (NHA)—has so far attracted some 53,000 city dwellers who have submitted online applications signifying their interest in returning to their home provinces.
“The social amelioration cluster of the DCC chaired by Speaker Alan Peter Cayetano has approved HB 6709 to set the stage for the Congress to help the Duterte administration reset the economy and generate jobs following the sudden work stoppage set off by the quarantine measures that were effected in mid-March to prevent COVID-19 spread,” Villafuerte said.
Villafuerte along with Speaker Cayetano and seven (7) more House leaders authored HB 6709 or the CURES Act, which aims to spur regional growth by allocating P1.5 trillion over the next three years for accelerated countryside spending on health, education, agriculture, local road and livelihood (HEAL) infrastructure.
‘With infrastructure investments having the highest multiplier effect on the economy, the DCC social amelioration subpanel has sought the swift congressional passage of HB 6709 to raise state spending on HEAL infrastructure to create rural jobs and blunt the impact of what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) expects to be the worst recession since the Great Depression in the 1930s,” Villafuerte said.
Cayetano and Villafuerte’s HB 6709 co-authors are Majority Leader and DCC co-chairman Ferdinand Martin Romualdez; Deputy Speakers Paolo Duterte and Loren Legarda; and Reps. Eric Yap, Maria Laarni Cayetano, Michael Defensor and Jose Antonio Sy-Alvarado.
Villafuerte cited the urgency of creating a lot of jobs in the countryside, given the huge number of city folk who have expressed interest in returning to their home provinces via the Balik Probinsya program. This return-to-the-provinces project was first espoused by Sen. Christopher Lawrence Go and subsequently endorsed by President Duterte by issuing Executive Order (EO) No. 114.
During the DCC subcommittee hearing, Villafuerte pointed out that local HEAL projects are needed to create jobs and other livelihood opportunities in the countryside, especially for Filipinos whose incomes were lost or reduced because of the COVID-19 crisis.
Hence, a major government effort is needed to create a significant number of jobs in rural areas via accelerated infrastructure investments, he said, because people in the provinces would continue to flock to Metro Manila and other urban centers if major projects are put up only in these areas.
“How can we create enough jobs in the countryside if the bulk of state infrastructure investments remain concentrated in Metro Manila and other urban centers?” he stressed during the subpanel hearing.
Villafuerte said the CURES fund should be automatically appropriated over and above the national budgets for the next three years, so such infrastructure development funds could be used at once implement HEAL projects in the provinces.
Earlier, NHA general manager Marcelino Escalada Jr. was quoted in a report as saying that 53,218 people sent their applications for the Balik Probinsya program within 10 days of opening the NHA’s online applications last May 10.
Escalada, who is concurrent Balik Probinsya executive director, said that among the initial provinces participating in this project are Leyte, Bohol, Lanao del Norte, Marinduque, Negros Occidental, Negros Oriental, Pangasinan, Quirino, Samar, Zamboanga del Norte, Zamboanga del Sur and Camarines Sur.
Before PRRD issued EO 114, Villafuerte and his son, Camarines Sur Gov. Luis Miguel Villafuerte, already offered a 300-hectare industrial estate within Camarines Sur’s Provincial Capitol complex near the Naga Airport as the first site where companies in Metro Manila could relocate to or open for business once the coronavirus pandemic is over.
This 300-hectare property is ideal for investors, he said, as it is equipped with the necessary infrastructure such as fiber optic internet connection, and already has a business processing outsourcing (BPO) company operating in the industrial park accredited by the Philippine Economic Zone Authority (PEZA) .
The former three-term Camarines Sur governor said he and Speaker Cayetano are also filing a bill institutionalizing the Balik Probinsyaprogram in support of the President’s EO 114.
Citing DOLE Bureau of Employment (BLE) data, a report said that the number of COVID-affected workers have reached 2,757,640 as 102,607 commercial establishments all over the country have either closed shop or adopted flexible working arrangements following the imposition of mobility restrictions by the national and local governments.
A total of 1,927,308 workers have lost their jobs following the temporary closure of 80,891 establishments while 949,873 others were affected by the flexible working modes adopted by 949,873 other establishments, according to the same report that cited DOLE-BLE data.
Meanwhile, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) has reported the repatriation of 19,466 overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as of April 25, with thousands more likely to come home soon as a result of the pandemic’s global economic fallout.
Amid the high unemployment and underemployment figures, Villafuerte said the congressional passage of the CURES Act is timely because this bill aims “to gear state infrastructure spending towards maximizing the direct and indirect creation and preservation of jobs, particularly in the rural countryside.”
He explained that HB 6709 seeks to create, appropriate and automatically release a special outlay dubbed the CURES Fund equivalent to P1.5 trillion over a three-year period to bankroll infrastructure projects in the HEAL priority areas.
Chosen projects should be “shovel-ready” right away or ready for construction within 90 days after the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) certifies actual fund release, he said.
Villafuerte said the enactment into law of the CURES Act will “provide a significant stimulus for accelerated economic recovery in the new normal scenario, alongside President Duterte’s centerpiece program ‘Build, Build, Build’ and further complemented by a ‘Plant, Plant, Plant’ program for long-term food self-sufficiency.”
The CURES Fund would be available for a wide gamut of projects ranging from barangay health centers and municipal and city hospitals to digital equipment for testing, “tele-health” services and e-prescriptions to post-harvest facilities, bagsakan centers and food terminals, among others.
Such funds would also be available for infrastructure projects like walking or bicycle lanes; bridges across creeks and irrigation canals; evacuation centers and disaster emergency facilities; and roads going to tourist spots, beaches, mountain parks, new business districts or economic zones, and hubs for small and medium-sized enterprises.
Funding would be available, too, for projects like farm-to-market roads (FMRs), roads connecting communities to schools and health facilities; along with the Enhanced Sustainable Livelihood Program of the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD), the Enhanced Tupad Program and Barangay Emergency Employment Program of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), and access of micro, small and medium-scale enterprises (MSMEs) to credit and financing.
As proposed in HB 6709, an initial P500 billion of this CURES Fund shall be released on the first year of this 2020-2022 economic stimulus and employment program, with P500 billion more for release on the second year, and the remaining P500 billion on the third and final year.
After the third year of the program’s implementation, the bill mandates the Congress to enact legislation either extending CURES or terminating its Fund. In case the program is terminated and there are un-obligated funds left in the Fund, HB 6709 states that the said balance shall be made available for the general budgetary requirements of the succeeding year after the project’s termination.
The bill’s authors recalled similarly ambitious programs in the past, such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) program in 1933 to create three million jobs in the United States (US) during the Great Depression, the Economic Cooperation Act of 1948 or Marshall Plan that was enacted by the US Congress to rehabilitate its war-torn allies in Europe after World War 2, and the Emergency Employment Act of 1962 that was passed by the Philippine Congress to create an Emergency Employment Administration to carry out large-scale public works projects.
Villafuerte said this CURES proposal is akin to the “New York Forward” initiative of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to build back a State better than the pre-pandemic New York by addressing systemic issues that have limited opportunity and progress for all New Yorkers while making its economy and workforce more resilient to future pandemics.
As what the authors of HB 6709 hope to achieve through accelerated HEAL spending, Villafuerte said Cuomos’s “Build Back Better” plan aims to, among others, (1) harden the healthcare system for the next medical crisis by expanding tele-medicine and remote-healthcare options, (2) expand affordable housing while reducing density in crowded environments, (3) create new jobs in the field of manufacturing critical goods and supplies that the State now imports from foreign countries, and (4) widening equitable access to new technologies and broadband internet.