President Rodrigo Duterte recognizes the importance of establishing peace and order to meet his administration’s poverty reduction targets.

Tranquility Like the serene ambience of this beach in Pandan, Antique, peace, according to Malacañang, is crucial towards reducing poverty in the country. JUN AGUIRRE

Achieving success in the Duterte administration’s peace-building initiatives is the key to realizing its poverty reduction efforts, a Malacañang official said.

In a statement, Cabinet Secretary Karlo Nograles stressed that the government’s measures in alleviating majority of Filipinos from poverty “are anchored on our ability to invigorate our economy, and the fate of our efforts to boost economic development rest in large part with the success of our peace-building initiatives.”

According to him, President Rodrigo Duterte recognizes the importance of establishing peace and order to meet his administration’s poverty reduction targets.

“We have a Chief Executive from Mindanao who knows that meeting the objectives of the 2017-2022 Philippine Development Plan requires that we achieve significant progress in forging peace with armed groups by 2022 and that it is necessary to significantly improve the delivery of services in conflict-affected and vulnerable communities in the region,” Nograles said in his keynote speech at the opening ceremonies of the 2019 National Peace Consciousness Month last Monday.

He went on by citing a recent World Bank report which states that “the importance of resolving conflict in Mindanao is necessary if we ultimately want our national poverty reduction efforts to succeed.”

The report, entitled “Making Growth Work for the Poor: A Poverty Assessment for the Philippines,” pointed the slow growth and development of Mindanao to the longs-standing armed conflict in parts of the region which has affected over 60 percent of Mindanao’s population.

The same report, according to the Palace official, also noted that “economic progress and poverty reduction in the Philippines will depend on the success of development in Mindanao.”

“As we commemorate National Peace Consciousness Month, it is imperative that we recognize that peace is a state desired by all and that our nation must collectively work for it if we want to realize our potential and lay the foundation for the kind of economic development required to lift our people out of poverty,” stated the former Davao lawmaker.

Nograles, the co-lead of the Inter-Cabinet Cluster Mechanism on Normalization (ICCMN) also bared that “everything is proceeding as planned for the implementation of the normalization program for the new Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao.”

“The ICCMN, we believe, will play a key role in the normalization process as it is expected to coordinate and mobilize relevant government agencies in implementing the various aspects of the normalization program, provide policy advice, further support and other necessary input or assistance to the appropriate modality and mechanism for the timely and smooth implementation of the different components of the program, supervise and monitor all socio-economic interventions under the program, and create a working group on vulnerable sectors to be composed of relevant government agencies,” he said.