RM awardee Krisana Kraisintu: Cheap drugs for poorest

Philippine Daily Inquirer/Feautre/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

MANILA, Philippines—Thai pharmacist Krisana Kraisintu vividly remembers coming to the Philippines many years ago and visiting a large Filipino-owned drug manufacturing facility.

Someone generously shared with her the formula for a tuberculosis medicine that she took back to her home country and worked on so that the sick poor could avail of it.

It was a display of Filipino generosity Kraisintu would never forget and she often mentions it. She wishes she knew who it was in Unilab that gave her the formula.

But Kraisintu’s own generosity is evident as she continues to share her expertise and live a life of service in order to help not just the people of Thailand but also many poor African countries where diseases, particularly HIV-AIDS, threaten the lives of a staggering number of the population.

Kraisintu, 57, is one of the six recipients of the Ramon Magsaysay Awards for 2009 who will be honored on Monday. The feisty pharmacist is being hailed “for placing pharmaceutical rigor at the service of patients, through her untiring and fearless dedication to producing much-needed generic drugs in Thailand and elsewhere in the world.”

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RM award for China's water guardians

Philippine Daily Inquirer/Feature
by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

MANILA, Philippines—Two Chinese activists who have literally immersed themselves in turbulent waters are among this year’s six Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation awardees.

Working separately and through different means, Ma Jun and Yu Xiaogang have devoted their lives to reversing the threat to China’s water systems, for many the source of life and livelihood.

Ma, 41, a former journalist, is being honored by the RMAF for “harnessing the technology and power of information to address China’s water crisis, and mobilizing pragmatic, multisectoral and collaborative efforts to ensure sustainable benefits for China’s environment and society.”

Yu, 58, is being recognized “for fusing the knowledge and tools of social science with a deep sense of social justice, in assisting dam-affected communities in China to shape the development projects that impact their natural environment and their lives.”

As a Beijing-based journalist working with Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, Ma Jun traveled extensively around China and saw how the country’s vaunted economic boom was threatening to destroy its water systems. He witnessed the torrential floods caused by the overflowing of the Yangtze River and other catastrophes.

Ma used his pen to raise the alarm and in 1999 published his book, “China’s Water Crisis.”

The book, with a chapter each devoted to the seven main water basins of China, opened people’s eyes to the problem and provided a way for many to get involved.

The main message of Ma’s book, hailed as China’s “first great environmental call to arms,” was: If we don’t change the way we use and manage our water sources, we will be facing a water crisis.

“People used to say, let’s get rich first. No, we must make space for the environment. We must try to live within our means and use water more efficiently,” he says in an interview.

Water pollution map

It was no surprise that Ma the journalist became a full-time environmentalist. In 2006, he founded the nongovernmental Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPEA) and launched the “China Water Pollution Map,” the first public database of its kind in China which monitors the current state of bodies of water.

In 2006, Ma was voted one of “Time’s 100, the People Who Shape Our World,” (which included the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s founder Eugenia Duran-Apostol).

On Saturday, the Magsaysay laureate went on a tour of the Pasig River and saw for himself how Metro Manila’s main water system is close to death because of pollution.

Factory of the world

According to Ma, the four challenges relating to water are pollution, dwindling supply, flooding and threats to the ecosystem.

“Modern farming is one source of pollution,” says Ma, and also blames rapid industrialization and globalization.

“China is indeed becoming the true factory of the world. And we dump pollution in our own backyard,” he says.

But he notes that the Chinese government is now “making concessions to nature.”

The IPEA, the group that Ma founded, conscientiously makes a list of corporate violators, which is taken seriously by everyone concerned.

Ma says transnationals like General Electric, Wal-Mart and Nike are using IPEA database to track the performance of their China suppliers.

Continuous research and data-gathering are part of IPEA’s work. The group has formed the Green Choice Alliance which makes companies commit to non-polluting methods and products.

85,000 dams

If Ma is focused mainly on threatened life-giving bodies of water, Yu Xiaogang has zeroed in on the water-harnessing projects that threaten to destroy lives, livelihood and habitats.

Yu grew up in Yunnan province, a place of tremendous beauty because of its mountains, rivers and lakes. The province has nine lakes and is drained by three of the world’s largest rivers—the Nu, the Yangtze and the Mekong.

But mystic landscapes of lakes and rivers threaten to become just a memory because of China’s staggering dam-building program to feed its mammoth energy needs.

Where there used to be mighty raging or smooth flowing rivers, there are now monstrous structures that control the waters.

Dams, supposedly the harbingers of progress have, in fact, brought doom and gloom to many natural habitats and cultural heritage sites.

China had, at last count, 85,000 dams, or 46 percent of the world's total.

The Three Gorges Dam, spanning the Yangtze and touted as the largest electricity-generating plant in the world, will be opening this year.

Dams, the threat they pose and the havoc they cause, are the primary concern of Yu, founder and director of Green Watershed. Begun in 2002, this non-profit NGO developed an integrated watershed management program in the Lashi Lake area in Yunnan.

Dams for whom?

While doing post-graduate research on the impact of the Manwan hydroelectric project, Yu discovered and documented its adverse impact on the area’s inhabitants.

Yu stirred a hornet’s nest, causing the government to investigate and act to remedy the dam’s destructive effects.

In the Lashi Lake area of Yunnan, a dam project diverted 40 percent of the lake’s waters, flooded farmlands and destroyed the people’s livelihood.

Green Watershed organized the Watershed Management Committee and mobilized people to engage in irrigation, fishery, microcredit and training in watershed protection and biodiversity conservation.

The Lashi project was so successful it became a model for participatory management. It even received a citation from the government.

Encouraged, Yu has expanded his campaign into other dam sites and other advocacies. Green Watershed has conducted research, organized forums and enlisted the help of the mass media.

In 2008, Yu initiated Green Banking, a coalition of environmental NGOs that confers the “Green Banking Innovation Award” to banks and financial institutions that include the environment in their corporate agenda.

Dam project stopped

When the government announced a project to build 13 dams on the Nu River, Green Watershed organized public debates. It argued that the dam would displace 50,000 people and affect a Unesco World Heritage nature site. The project has been put on hold by Premier Wen Jiabao.

Yu insists that communities and ecosystems need not be sacrificed on the altar of development.

“Thirty years ago, dams were for agriculture. Now it is for electricity, for profit. There are now so many dams in China and, for some, the market has not even been identified,” he says in an interview.

In campaigning against this proclivity for building dams for dams’ sake, Yu and his fellows have taken the first steps in the “Long March” toward a truly sustainable future.

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OFWs’ quest for healing

Father Robert Reyes, the so-called “running priest” who is now working with a human rights group in Hong Kong has come out with a collection of his reflections on his late younger brother Vincent who died of lung cancer in 2004 at the age of 47. A case has been filed against a giant tobacco company which must answer for the illness and death that cigarettes have caused and which Reyes is pursuing on behalf of his brother. But that is another story.

The book, “Vincent, Dying and Living” contains personal reflections, recollections as Robert accompanied his brother in battle. The last and third portion of the book is a collection of stories of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in Hong Kong whom Fr. Reyes had met and ministered to in their illness. He was present to a number of them in the last days of their lives. The stories were written by the OFWs themselves, some in Filipino.

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Hidden cameras and Cory’s huge suitcase

If you were one of those who visited Ninoy Aquino during the eight years (1972 to 1980) that he was in military prison, chances are a photograph of yourself was among the hundreds that the military studied and kept in their dossiers for whatever purpose they might have served.

And chances are your photo is now in the archives of Ninoy’s widow, former President Corazon Aquino, who passed away on Aug. 1 and had a massive send-off that could rival Ninoy’s. Hadn’t Cory sent you a copy when she was alive?

During her presidency that started after the 1986 People Power Revolt that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, President Aquino received a stack of photographs from the military. Many of the original copies the military gave her had notes on the back, she told me during an interview some years ago. She had not asked for the photos, she had never seen them before.

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Bad bananas and collateral damage

I do not understand why there are people who vigorously defend aerial spraying of banana plantations even though it adversely affects communities that live and farm in the vicinity of these plantations. I do not understand why they do not realize that what is poisonous and deadly for pests and fungi in bananas is also poisonous and deadly for human beings, farm animals and plants. I do not understand why they do not want to use safer methods which are just as effective and are being used in places where aerial spraying is banned.

The banana growers and exporters who insist on this practice to save on costs and get higher profits might soon find themselves the victims of the toxic fallout of their own making. Lobby groups abroad that are sympathetic to the anti-aerial spraying advocates here might just raise a howl and expose the real cost of these bananas in terms of collateral damage on human lives and the environment. Who would like to buy and eat bananas that are produced in this manner? Consumers are now more discriminating.

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Aerial spraying: People run for cover when crop dusters fly

Philippine Daily Inquirer/Features

MANILA, Philippines — “Dili kami peste (We are not pests.)”

This is the cry of communities near banana plantations in Mindanao who have to suffer the adverse effects of regular toxic aerial spraying meant to kill pests in bananas.

School children on their way to school, farmers cultivating their small farms, people drinking coffee al fresco and families doing their daily chores are among those who suffer indirect hits and have to run for cover when airplanes unleash pesticides on vast banana plantations. While they are not the intended targets, there is no way they can avoid getting hit by the airplanes’ toxic load. Respiratory and skin ailments are among the first signs of a toxic hit.

Farm animals, edible plants and water sources also catch their share of the toxic rain.

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Sainthood for Cory

Blessed Corazon. Santa Cory. Saint Cory Aquino of the Philippines. Filipinos will have to get used to the sound of it.

The renewed groundswell of adulation and fervor directed toward former President Corazon C. Aquino who died on Aug. 1 could point to a new direction: Rome. Already, many people, Church leaders among them, are putting religious significance in the manner, time and timeliness of her death.

It will not be farfetched if many Filipinos begin to consider Cory a candidate for canonization, or at least for beatification by the Roman Catholic Church. I, for one, think she could be a candidate.

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