People already know how it goes. There’s a list. You line up, sometimes before sunrise. If your name is there, you receive a temporary reprieve. If it isn’t, you go home to navigate the impossible alone.
A few days later, the relief is gone. But the problem remains.
The cost of living is rising: food, transport, electricity. Wages, meanwhile, are anchored to the floor. Entire communities are still clearing the mud from the last flood when the next storm rolls in. Work is unstable, but expenses are relentless. It is always the same households carrying the weight of the world, again and again.
Yet, the state’s response remains trapped in a loop: short-term bursts of ayuda, announced as relief but treated as a solution. But relief without direction is not a plan; it is a repetition.
The Mechanics of the Squeeze
Right now, Filipinos are being crushed by pressures that are globally connected but locally felt. Tensions in Western Asia—the escalation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran—have sent oil prices surging. In the Philippines, that movement is not abstract but a direct hit to the gut.
• On the road, it shows up in jeepney fares. Transport group PISTON have long warned that drivers are forced into a zero-sum game: raise fares or starve.
• In the fields, farmers are squeezed as fertilizer prices move in lockstep with fuel. The Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP) has repeatedly shown how expensive urea cuts directly into food production and survival.
• For small fisherfolk, diesel is the lifeblood of the trade. PAMALAKAYA warns that when prices spike, fishing becomes a loss-making activity before a single net is even cast.
With diesel hovering near ₱100 per liter during adjustment cycles, these “market fluctuations” translate into empty plates. As IBON Foundation has argued, our economy is structured to pass every external shock to the consumer while wages remain stagnant.
The Narrowing Space
Where is the plan? What we see instead is fragmentation. Assistance that is reactive rather than protective. Programs that assume the poor can simply “adjust” to conditions they did not create.
Ayuda temporarily fills the gap, but it never closes it.
While the cycle repeats, a more sinister pattern is emerging. The community organizations, NGOs and volunteers who step in where the government fails are being met with suspicion. Red-tagging, surveillance, and public accusations have created a climate of fear. The effect is predictable: when the environment for collective action is weakened, fewer people speak, and fewer communities are reached.
What kind of governance prioritizes suspicion over support?
When the government treats community organizers as threats, it is because they fear the very solidarity that can break this cycle of dependency.
Beyond Survival
The issue is not whether ayuda is distributed, but why it has become the default solution of survival. Good governance is not measured by how fast relief is released when a crisis hits; it is measured by whether people are less exposed to the crisis in the first place.
Instead of ayuda, the government must implement long term solutions such as removal of taxes that bloat our fuel prices and the enactment of a living wage that actually sustains a family. It should shift from market driven to a people-centered economy.
A people-centered economy ensures wages that outpace inflation. It ensures that food, transport, and energy be treated as basic needs rather than volatile market outcomes only for those able to afford these.
We don’t need another list to wait on; we need to reclaim the resources that belong to the people. The way forward is not found in government offices; it is found in our collective refusal to survive on crumbs.#
