THE drama in the Senate may have temporarily distracted us from the struggles of everyday life. What I feared the most — that the government dispatched armed personnel to arrest Sen. Bato de la Rosa at any and all costs — didn’t happen. The discharging of firearms could obviously have been avoided, but thankfully, no one was hurt. The Senate was not under attack.
What is under attack, however, is the already eroding quality of life, not the least in Cebu. April inflation went 2-digit. Cebu province topped with 12.9 percent, way above the national inflation rate of 7.2 percent. For the bottom 30 percent of households, the inflation rate hit 16.1 percent in the province, with 17.3 percent and 18 percent in Cebu City and Lapu-Lapu City, respectively. The PSA has also reported that the wholesale price of white corn grits, a popular alternative to rice in Cebu, increased by a whopping 76.3 percent from April 2025 to April 2026. The price of regular milled rice has gone up more than 40 percent. The result? More families go hungry. Social Weather Stations’ survey, conducted in March, found a 28 percent hunger rate among families in the Visayas. The number could be higher now. Cebu province has long suffered a relatively high poverty incidence. The poverty rate among families soared to 30.3 percent (22.8 percent when the three HUCs are included) during the pandemic. While poverty among families had declined to 15.7 percent by 2023, the vulnerabilities that produced the high poverty during the pandemic likely persist, as the relatively high inflation rate suggests.
Garbage crisis. Cebu City Mayor Nestor Archival on May 6, four months after the Binaliw landfill disaster, officially declared a solid waste management emergency. A contract good for about three months’ worth of garbage hauling and disposal at a private landfill in Aloguinsan town has ended. A systematic, clear campaign to educate households and establishments about proper segregation has yet to take off. Consumption of single-use plastic cups and shopping bags — low-hanging fruits in terms of achieving waste reduction — continues in “business as usual” fashion.
Uncollected garbage was already a common sight in many of the city’s neighborhoods long before the Binaliw disaster. Just like the crisis of water supply. Despite increasing its water production, the Metro Cebu Water District has not been able to keep up with the increase in demand within its service area. We may blame the water district for failure to fix leaks and replace aging pipes and other infrastructure. But that’s not all. Metro Cebu’s model for economic development has been taking water for granted. Rapid, unsustainable urbanization, unsustainable drawing of water from the aquifer, and failure to protect watersheds are among the factors that make long-term water security for all unattainable, especially in the light of the increased risk of more frequent and more severe droughts due to climate change. The 2024 drought served as a preview of what is to come.
Metro Cebu experienced very unhealthy air quality for several days in April. The Environmental Management Bureau explained that no “external sources” — such as volcanic eruptions or massive forest fires — had been detected. Meaning, the very unhealthy air that Cebuanos were choking on was homemade: exhaust and non-exhaust (tire wear and tear) vehicular emissions, industrial emissions, smoke and dust. This is the everyday pollution that the wind usually blows away. But stagnant air trapped the pollution, which then accumulated over several days, making a bad situation worse.
Cebu, under the sweltering heat of summer, is now facing rotational brownouts. But somehow it seems like a lesser problem, something that can be managed, compared to Cebu’s shockingly low functional literacy rates. According to the 2024 Functional Literacy, Education, and Mass Media Survey (Flemms), the functional literacy rates in Cebu province, Cebu City, and Lapu-Lapu City were 63.1 percent, 65.9 percent and 67.2 percent, respectively, below the national average of 70.8 percent. How did that happen? Fisheries production is another area of concern, with production declining over the past 20 years. The years 2024 and 2025 saw modest recoveries from the all-time low of 2023, but Cebu’s marine capture fisheries production in 2025 was still only about a third of what it was in 2005.
The war in the Middle East is hurting everyone and has pushed more families into hardship. However, much of the mess that we, as a community and a country, find ourselves in existed long before the US and Israel attacked Iran. And long before the flood control corruption scandal, the impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte, and the events at the Senate last May 13. Such happenings don’t exactly help us deal with the many serious economic and social problems besetting the country. In fact, they lay bare the deep divisiveness and lack of common ground characterizing the nation. However, many of the ills that confront us in our daily lives have their roots in or are exacerbated by wrong policies and priorities at the local level. Local governments must do more to attack the problems, decisively and expeditiously.
