By Anil Netto
The headline of last week’s Edge Weekly said it all: “Job crunch”. Bank Negara has reportedly released figures indicating that unemployment is forecasted to rise to 4.5 per cent this year. That’s 540,000 jobless workers out of a 12 million labour force. The number of unemployed could be more as this only represents reported job losses.

Much of the problem lies in the plunge in the manufacturing sector, where we are seeing double digit drops in exports.

The problem is that over the years we have become so dependent on foreign direct investment (FDI) driving out economy that we have almost forgotten our local economy and how to make it self-sufficient. We have wrongly equated economic growth with social well-being. The hope was that high-levels of FDI would lead to rapid economic growth which would “trickle down” to the rest of the population.

But the moment global consumer demand dropped as a result of subprime crisis making many Americans poorer. The Americans are of course the world’s biggest consumers. And when their purchasing power dropped, the rest of the world found they couldn’t export as much as before.

Unfortunately, the public in Asia, for instance, couldn’t afford to buy take up the slack because wages in many parts of the region had not kept pace with the rising cost of living.

Just look at how much food prices cost: a trip to the market will tell us how much the prices of vegetables, fruit and fish have soared.

At one time, many of the major towns had vegetable farms, orchards, and fishing communities. These provided fresh supplies for the local residents. But development pressure — guided by policies that favoured property development over food security — turned many farms and orchards into highrise office and apartment blocks.

During the Japanese Occupation, many households had to go back to basics. Planting tapioca or tanam ubi, breeding chicken and other livestock, and growing their own fruit.

Unfortunately, even if we wanted to plant our own food now, it is more difficult now. Those in high-rise buildings can only have potted plants; many of those fortunate enough to have landed property have cemented their lawns and green spaces. Even local parish churches, over the years, have poured concrete and tar all over their premises, so that there are few green spaces on church premises these days.

Perhaps those churches still left with green spaces can experiment with community organic farms as a first step to getting people interested in community organic farming as an alternative to the big money, agrobusiness farming that uses lots of chemical-based fertilizers and pesticides.

With the spectre of unemployment rising, churches should prepares themselves to handle the ever-increasing numbers of retrenched or unemployed workers in the local communities. What can we do to help the retrenched and the unemployed in terms of emergency relief and longer-term support to get them back on their feet?

Parishes may consider starting a register of the unemployed and retrenched so there is some idea of the scale of the problem. PIHD committees may want to explore setting up thrift stores, selling subsidized essential items, and cooperatives to help hose experiencing hard times. They could also look at how the skills and talents of those unemployed can be tapped and encourage others in the parish to use those skills.

For example if a retrenched parishoner is good at baking or cooking, the next time anyone in the parish is throwing a party and needs a caterer, they could engage the services of this retrenched person.

Or if someone is an unemployed IT graduate and is good at creating websites, he or she could be hired by others in the parish to build websites for them.

Similarly for other talents and skills. The point is we have to look at our own resources and build on what we have in the community. We need to restore the sense of community which over the years and decades has been gradually destroyed by the process of industrialisation and individualism. We should not mourn too much the passing of the old order. Industrialisation has invariably led to the alienation of the human being, increased stress, widened the gap between the rich and the poor, and left many workers unable to cope with the rising cost of living.

We need to explore the thinking and ideas of brilliant thinkers who have looked at alternative economics. Many of these are Catholic thinkers so we have a rich heritage of ideas we can draw upon: people like G K Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc who put forward the ‘third-way’ theory of 'distributivism' and those like Catholic Workers movement founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who developed this theory and tried to put it into practice in localised communities. There have been other great Catholic thinkers such as E F Schumacher, who authored the book “Small is beautiful”. This book explored ideas related to sustainable development and local economics while criticizing large-scale industrialisation that degraded the environment and led to greater concentration of economic power in the hands of a few.

The point is we have not really explored — much less put into practice — the new, alternative ideas that can be found inside our own Catholic heritage — ideas which build on Catholic Social Teaching and nourish its development.