Lugar Hopeful Despite Filipinos’ Poverty : Senator’s Tour Ends With Visit to Economically Ravaged Area

Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) visited the malnutrition ward of a government hospital Tuesday and winced at the sight of a 6-year-old girl who weighed less than 20 pounds.

The girl will probably be dead within a day, a young Filipino doctor told Lugar. According to hospital figures, 648 children died in the ward last year from complications attributable to starvation.

Moments later, Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was in a Roman Catholic church next to a garbage dump where thousands of families manage to live on what they can scavenge. He watched as a volunteer weighed undernourished babies on an old scales. Their mothers had come in for the monthly ration of U.S. food aid.

Next, Lugar was taken to a nearby elementary school, where he saw dozens of day laborers who are paid just over $1 a day to make paper Christmas ornaments in an experimental aid project financed by the United States. The workers are among more than 100,000 sugar-cane cutters thrown out of work by a crisis in the sugar industry.

Economically Devastated

“Welcome to the Lopez Jaena Elementary School,” the principal said as she greeted the senator. “This is where we are teaching the poorest of the poor of the world.”

In a six-hour tour of the capital of Negros province, Lugar was shown one of the most economically devastated regions of the Philippines, an island where the Philippine Communist Party’s armed insurgency has exploited poverty and built one of its strongest local organizations.

Nonetheless, as Lugar returned to Manila in the evening, he was optimistic about the Philippines’ future.

“I’m more optimistic than I was maybe three months ago,” he said in an interview.

Six months after the change of government in which he played a key role, Lugar said that he believes the future is bright for the government of President Corazon Aquino. He said that he and a majority in Congress are confident that she will find solutions to the problems that plague the country.

Aquino, he said, is “very savvy,” a leader “who knows the score.”

Lugar’s tour of Negros was a highlight of an official three-day visit to the Philippines. It is his first visit since the Feb. 7 election that helped bring about the ouster of President Ferdinand E. Marcos.

Headed Observer Team

Lugar headed a team of congressional observers that found widespread fraud in the election. Three weeks later, Marcos was driven from the country in a military revolt that brought Aquino to power.

Lugar’s observations on this trip have added significance because of Aquino’s scheduled U.S. visit next month. She is to meet with President Reagan and address a joint session of Congress in an effort to get additional U.S. aid.

Lugar and his aides say that Aquino is likely to return with a windfall in U.S. economic support.

“If she is able to establish the Philippines as a major focal point of American foreign policy, the money is definitely going to come,” Lugar said Tuesday.

He said that on the basis of what he heard Monday at a three-hour lunch with the president and at meetings with military and political leaders in Manila, he is confident Aquino can deal with the squabbles in her government and between her government and the military, which disagree on how to deal with the Communist insurgency.

Good Ear for Chitchat

“I’m just too impressed with the fact that President Aquino is aware of all this,” Lugar said. “She has a good ear for the chitchat and the rumors. . . . Through all of this, people still have the feeling that Mrs. Aquino is a remarkable person.”

He said his “personal biases always err on the side of optimism” but conceded that the economic obstacles facing Aquino are enormous.

On the island of Negros, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have been thrown out of work and hundreds of families are starving. Lugar saw evidence of this in the malnutrition ward and at the church, and heard of it in an open forum with local leaders.

They told him how the island’s sugar industry has failed, how Marcos’ cronies have stolen millions of dollars and how the U.S. government can help.

“We need your markets,” a sugar plantation owner told Lugar, referring to the Philippines’ longstanding request that the United States permit increased imports of Philippine sugar.

Lugar told the gathering that he managed to amend a bill on sanctions against South Africa, approved by the Senate last week, so that it transfers South Africa’s sugar quota to the Philippines. He said the amendment will increase the Philippines’ share of U.S. imports from 13% to 16%.

Urges Diversification

He added, however, that the only long-term solution is for Negros, basically a one-crop island, to begin diversifying to other crops.

At his final meeting Tuesday, Lugar heard the Roman Catholic bishop of Negros, Antonio Fortich, suggest another solution to the problems besetting Negros, which has long been controlled by powerful landowners.

Fortich said the island is being taken over by the Communist Party and its military wing, the New People’s Army, adding: “In order to maintain peace in the province, we have to go into sharing of the land--true land reform. It is very simple. If we do not realize this, there will be no peace, none.”

On the flight back to Manila, Lugar conceded that the insurgency is “a tremendous problem” for the government. But he maintained his optimistic tone, which was reflected in a speech and a press conference this morning before he departed for Taiwan, the second stop on his 15-day tour of eight countries.

“You can put all kinds of barriers in front of democratic impulses,” he said, “but the force of history is going to sweep them all away.”