'Free market', export-led development strategy and its impact on rural livelihoods, poverty and inequality: The Philippine experience seen from a Southeast Asian perspective

The 'free market', export-led development strategy has not delivered its promise of development in agriculture, as far as the Philippines is concerned. The World Bank- and IMF-instigated privatization and deregulation policies with direct consequence to rural livelihoods carried out much earlier and far wider in the Philippines than in some other Southeast Asian countries have coincided, overlapped and interlinked with the GATT/WTOtrade/exchange rules. These two broad sets of policy related to agricultural production and exchange, combined, have largely reinforced, not undermined or eroded, pre-existing agrarian structures dominated by domestic and transnational elites. The overall outcome is the opposite of neoliberal reformers' predictions: the transformation of the Philippines from a net agricultural exporting to a net agricultural importing country. This development strategy has failed to address the persistence of poverty and growing inequality in this country. If a poverty-eradicating strategic national development is to be achieved in the Philippines and in some of the latter's regional neighbors, a radical recasting of the pre-existing agrarian structures partly through explicitly pro-poor land policies will be necessary and urgent.