Retired Supreme Court Chief Justice challenged graduates of Silliman University to use their education to help uplift the poor people in the country.
In his speech during the 99th Commencement Exercises held at the Silliman Gymnasium last Sunday, Puno cited studies that predicted that hunger will get worse in third world countries because food prices will still to go up due to world population growth, expanding use of crops for biofuel and rising demand from fast growing, more and more affluent economies.
The prediction, made by the UN Food and Agricultural Organization, also said other factors that will jack up food prices beyond the reach of the poor are: 1) increasingly unpredictable farm conditions due to climate change, drought and changes in rainfall, 2) overfishing with too much investment in fishing, new technologies and illegal fishing, 3) deterioration of river systems due to pollution, agricultural runoff and dams, 4) reduced investment in agriculture, 5) corrupt over importation and hoarding of food leading to rotting stocks, 6) falling household incomes due to the economic downturn, and 7) rising prices of farm inputs like fertilizer and diesel fuel.
Puno also painted a bleak picture of the Philippine environment which the same U.N. study said is disturbing. He said studies show that the country is now a major ‘ecological hotspot’ with critically endangered forests and forest cover down to only 18 percent.
Another recent study conducted by the Heritage Foundation also rated the Philippines as “mostly unfree” in its study of the economic freecom of countires all over the world. Economic freedom, as defined by that study, “empowers people to work, produce, consume, own, trade and invest according to their personal choices.”
“I call on you to use your knowledge, your new power to promote the socio-economic rights of our poor people,” he said.
Puno said the socio-economic rights of the poor can never be relegated to the sidelines because they are in truth, essential conditions for the full enjoyment of civil and political rights. “Liberty can be meaningful only if the individual enjoys a certain degree of material security. Freedom of expression, for instance, is of little value to the illiterate whose interest is more on how to fill up his empty stomach.”
We must not grow weary in promoting the socio-economic rights of the poor, Puno said.
