When Vendors Violate People's Rights & Farmers Violate The Earth

Sidewalk selling and rice farming – both look innocent, don't they? 

As SAKA moves to "Defend The Urban Poor’s Right To The City" (11 July 2019, Hiyaw, hiyaw.net), I see a parallel: "Defend the poor farmer's right to the farm he has been abusing all these years!"

SAKA does not want the poor vendors brushed aside like what Mayor Isko Moreno has been doing? As if the Mayor likes what he is doing to the poor usurpers of everyone's space!

Understand. SAKA is "Sama-Samang Artista para sa Kilusang Agraryo" that which translates itself as the "Artist Alliance for Genuine Land Reform and Rural Development." Here, I discuss land reform along with rural development, if only to point out that poor city vendors happily taking over streets in Manila is neither land reform nor rural development!

SAKA says:

Dispossessed in the countryside, peasants come to the city looking for better opportunities. But here they find the same dispossession, the same violence. We would like to think this is not what the new mayor wants.

Those peasants go to the city looking for quick cash, just like the farmers growing a cash crop, except that the vendor waits only for 4 hours a day while the farmer waits for 4 months for the cash to come.

The cash mentality of the common vendor and the common farmer is good neither for them nor society.

Comparisons:

Going for Cash
For the vendor, that 4-hour cash does not assure a good life. For the farmer, that 4-month cash does not assure a good life either. In the meantime, the vendors prevent other citizens from enjoying their rights; and the farmers cause climate change by their conventional farming causing so much greenhouse gas emissions (US EPA, epa.gov)!

Except in scale and nature, sidewalk vendors and farmers both cause climate change!

Going for Development
Why expect Manila or any other city overcrowded by sidewalk vendors to take care of those vendors who are where they should not be? SAKA, instead of City Hall, talk/shout at the Department of Interior & Local Government, DILG!

I am not a Manileño, but my attitude there is that Isko Moreno is pushing the DILG, even President Rodrigo Duterte, to do something concrete – and now – about abuse of citizen rights to physical space.

My idol John F Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country." So why not SAKA shouting at the offices of the DILG to move the mountain called Sidewalk Vendors?

SAKA says:

And so we ask: Why is the good Mayor taking against street vendors their own poverty, why does he aggravate their lack of access to opportunities, why does he discriminate them through clearing operations that disregard their livelihood and living conditions?

I say, "Access to opportunities belongs to everyone."

Also, SAKA refers to "the backwardness of our agricultural industry" – I equate it with the lack of entrepreneurship among farmers.

Vendors are wrong usurping rights, just as farmers are wrong causing climate change!517