The Defense of a Community-Oriented Industrialization is not a Rear-Guard Action to Resist the Wave of the Future

The plea for the village and for the community, the defense of a community-oriented and an agro - based industrialization is not a rear - guard action to resist the wave of the future.On the contrary, it is an advanced guard operation to save the country from establishing an obsolete economic, technological, social and political structure.It rides on the advantage of the latecomer who has not yet committed its natural resources totally to uses that have already been rendered obsolete by the advance of technology and the lessons that have been learned in the more advanced countries.

The program advocated differs from a mere return to traditional agriculture - to neolithic times.It calls for the application of the most modern technology but to economic activities organized not along the Second Wave sector - specialized enterprise ; but on community lines, based on a new paradigm modeled on nature: communal, intensive production methods, diversified, and conceived from the viewpoint of the ultimate beneficiary -the human household and his natural communities.

As it is important to select the unit of analysis that is appropriate, it is important that this unit be also a unit of management and a unit of accounting. The country is too large and within each country, particularly in the Third World, situations too diverse to make any proposition that is at all meaningful for the country as a whole. They certainly are too large to manage in ways that will balance utilization with conservation.

Organization defines the resources to be placed within the responsibility of a group of managers, the goals they must achieve and the standards by which the performance is to be measured, and the rewards at stake for successful operations as well as, on the downside, the losses or penalties that will be incurred for failure.

Communities in an integral habitat (considered as an ecosystem)should be as important and operational a unit of organization, management, planning. and accounting as business enterprises.But community organizations must be established with the same degree of rigorous controls, technological excellence, managerial discipline and operational efficiency as any business enterprise.

Carving out resource management responsibilities in a way that allows private individual businesses to pass on the costs of resource wastage and environmental degradation to society while retaining the gains from exploitation is hardly a satisfactory design for social organization.

No amount of policing by government will preserve resources for as long as sector - specialized enterprises are able to appropriate gains and escape costs for resource wastage.

The biological homologue provides an interesting key to understanding the pathology of past Philippine development andthe possible approach a sustainable development strategy for the future.A new perception of nature provides the design for both Strategy and Structure.

Understanding the roots of problems in the Philippine may give an inkling of their causes in the planet as well.The strategy for addressing the crises in the Philippines may say something about what are necessary to meet them globally.

The Philippines shows in a microcosm all the major issues of the planet: poverty, environmental crisis and social conflict.

a)The root cause of these problems in the Philippines: the application of a theory and strategy for development that has been disastrous, particularly for an island system.

b)The delicate balances of nature - the genesis of our cosmos and our habitat, its internal balance, the genesis of the biosphere, the genesis of man and the human community - are a cameo of the planetary process.As are the order and chaos in the forming here of a dynamic balance between organic and inorganic matter and between the living world and its physical habitat and the coming of man, his socialization and the molding of his balance with his habitat.

c)The laws of nature and the laws of his settlements are sharply depicted in this archipelago.

So the world may well look at the Philippines in 1997 to say, "There, if the grace of God and the wisdom of man do not save us, the globe might stand."

Standing in the Philippines in the Fall of 1997, can the grace of God and the wisdom of man save the Philippines? Or shall we once again live up to the description of our people phrased by our great Nationalist Claro M. Recto who said of the Pilipino that he was "a nation unique in the annals of mankind, a sacrificial race with a mysterious urge to suicide."