Philippine Legislators and Their Changing Universe

Abstract

r HE PHILIPPINES, as is true of developing nations in general, is faced with the persistence of patterns of human behavior that set massive limits upon the type and rate of change possible. Despite grim warnings from the central Luzon tenants stretching over four decades that the agrarian system will have to be changed if the larger political system is to survive, ameliorative acts extending over nearly as long a period have as yet had little positive effect. Equally intractable is the problem of food supply. No combination of policies seems able to reverse the trend which leaves the Philippines each year importing more foodstuffs-especially rice and fish-than it did the year before, even though the nation should, according to its population/land ratio, be a food-exporting one. Finally, the best laid plans of highly competent men have not significantly shifted the export economy of the Philippines away from its reliance upon a narrow range of primary agricultural products. These have not been radically changed since the period of the American occupation and are not greatly dissimilar from the late Spanish era. But if such continuities determine which problems will repeat themselves to each generation of men in the developing nations, the cumulative pressures from changes already accomplished have their own logic to present in the dialectic. A steadily expanding network of roads, for example, coupled with the ever more readily available inter-island ocean and air transportation facilities create a situation within which a vastly wider variety of responses to endemic problems is possible. If an accelerating revolution has been taking place in Philippine transportation, a comparable series of