‘Pagpag’ mirrors failure
In 2025, the lid was blown off the massive corruption in budget spending, with more than P1 trillion in flood projects alone subjected to pilferage involving the highest government officials.
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In 2025, the lid was blown off the massive corruption in budget spending, with more than P1 trillion in flood projects alone subjected to pilferage involving the highest government officials.
A major New Delhi digital news program declared that the Philippines is broken, and did so while President Marcos was in the Indian capital attending the Summit of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, or BRICS, where he shook hands with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi.
Manila has heard versions of this derogatory line before. The Indian documentary showed Filipinos eating “pagpag,” recooked leftovers of fast-food customers scavenged from garbage cans, and small businesses turning to the dreaded “five-six” lenders, who charge exorbitant interest for a few days’ loan. It also pointed to rice selling at P50 a kilo, a stark contrast to the government-hyped P20-per-kilo promise.
The program noted that economic growth had slowed from above 5 percent and the national debt had surpassed 60 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).
The uncomfortable part is that you can’t simply dismiss these images or numbers as foreign propaganda. They reflect the hardships that Filipinos continue to experience.
The hunger surveys really are as bad as the program suggested, and in some respects worse than the government is willing to admit.
“The Philippines has been one of the fastest-growing economies in Southeast Asia with a growth rate of more than 5 percent until mid 2025. But something went wrong after that,” the report said.
In 2025, the lid was blown off the massive corruption in budget spending, with more than P1 trillion in flood projects alone subjected to pilferage involving the highest government officials.
Manufacturing has shrunk as a share of the economy, and agriculture was neglected while successive administrations found it easier to import rice, sugar and onions rather than invest in irrigation and farm roads.
Filipino economists have been making this argument for years, and the basic diagnosis that the Philippines skipped an industrial phase and moved directly from agriculture to a service economy is not a new one.
The documentary, aired online, suggested that cracks in the economy worsened and turned into a crisis during the Marcos administration.
It highlighted an urgency, and the word it reached for was crisis, which implies something sudden in an economy on the edge of collapse.
The Philippines has a chronic condition. Over roughly two decades, a consumption-driven economy built on remittances and call center revenue, with very little industrial base underneath it, was allowed to persist.
When either income stream slows, there is little to absorb the shock.
The report described a country suddenly falling apart because its economic structure was built without a foundation, through a long series of choices that culminated in recent policy failures.
The timing of the news report also mattered, as it coincided with the summit centering on major emerging economies, and the Philippines became an example of what should not happen to the BRICS by highlighting a slum in Tondo as the Philippine president arrived.
More than half of Filipino families have described themselves as poor in independent surveys, while nearly a quarter of the population has reported experiencing hunger. “Pagpag” is resorted to because a bowl costs as little as P20, cheap enough to pass for a meal among the poorest of the poor. That is not merely a sign of poverty but a measure of policy failure.
The “five-six” lending system thrives because no affordable alternative was built for the people who depend on it. The promise to bring rice down to P20 a kilo for the majority has likewise been left unfulfilled.
The brutally frank assessment in the foreign report was addressed to the BRICS, outlining what an emerging economy should avoid doing.
It just so happens that the Philippines under Marcos fit the bill perfectly.
