The Impact of Structural Adjustment Programs on Women in the Essay

The Impact of Structural Adjustment Programs on Women in the Philippines - Essay good exampleUnder the first pirate flag implemented for the Philippines in 1981, the objective was to reshape a largely protectionist regime under the Marcos dictatorship into an export- lead economy through bargain and financial liberalization and tight credit policy. However, subsequent events proved the SAP strategy wrong, as evidenced by the depreciation of the Philippine peso by 10 percent in 1983, double-digit inflation and unemployment, declining wages and the unimproved quality of exports due mainly to low output costs and cheap labor. During these years, political aspiration to the martial law government of Marcos was escalating, which became a nationwide disturbance when top opposition leader Benigno Aquino was assassinated in 1984 by suspected Marcos hit men. This led to massive capital flight that forced Marcos to call a snap election in 1985, in which the widow of Aquino emerged victori ous. As the GDP began to grow by a moderate 5.6 percent under the second IMF-WB program undertaken for the Aquino government (Lim & Montes, 2001), the economy suffered one setback after another as Marcos loyalists held disruptive rallies and resist soldiers separately staged a series of military coups from 1987 to 1989. This paper examines how SAP failed the Philippines, specifically how and why its required policy reforms marginalized women in the Philippines in terms of group meeting their rights to education, health and livelihood. 2. How SAP Worked Against Philippine Women The SAP requirement for an export-led strategy of economic growth created shifts in the use of land and other resources, reorganized business processes, and changed production relations as well as existing social institutions (Sparr, 1994). This was generally how SAP worked to the disadvantage of Philippine women. On land use, for example, one of the main thrusts of SAP is to remove subsidies from agricultu ral production intended for local consumption and to re-channel the funds instead to the production of cash crops for the export market (Sparr, 1994). Rural women in the Philippines sum up the meager income of their farmer-husbands by engaging in the backyard production of crops that can be sold in the local market. Moreover, women share farm work with their men especially in seeding and harvesting. When the incentives for growing crops with a ready market were taken away, the women lost an important source of income to the detriment of her family (Elson, 1995). The problem was that government promoted export production although founding prices were extremely low (Lim & Montes, 2001). In the Philippines, land was transferred from the traditional crops of rice and corn to the production of sugar cane, bananas and pineapples with a concomitant increase in the size of holdings and great mechanization but also a rise in the number of landless households (Elson, 1995). The main result was to further marginalize women in crop production as they are largely excluded from sugar cultivation. Rural women in the Philippines farm for home production and the local markets and rarely is it done for the export