WE HAVE become a land of hungry people, where hungry mothers sell their bodies and their babies, where hungry fathers sell their kidneys, where hungry farmers eat field rats, where hungry parents seek work even in terror-stricken Iraq, where hungry infants die every day at the nation’s public hospitals, and where hungry children begging for food in the nation’s streets have become as common a sight as uncollected garbage.

Having been in the active, continuous supervision of the economy since 1962, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) must accept primary responsibility for the consequences of its policy prescriptions.

A major consequence and by-product of those prescriptions has been the foreign debt for which the IMF must take full responsibility. Those policy prescriptions, notably devaluation, have backfired and aggravated the poverty problem. This is a fact acknowledged by no less than the staff of the IMF in a study released in 1988.

For insisting on those prescriptions, the IMF must be held to have acted in bad faith. The policy prescriptions — being a deadly mix of the continuous opening of the domestic market to imports, continuous devaluation of the peso and fiscal-monetary restraint — have led to and explain the destruction of local industries, the continuous rise in prices and a depressive influence on business as well as in unnecessary cuts in welfare services.

The IMF prescriptions have proved to be a formula for hunger.

The policy prescriptions were designed to suppress industrialization. The IMF and the World Bank opposed the effort of Ferdinand Marcos to start industrialization based on 11 major industrial projects.

Foreign loans, which translate into the foreign debt, were the carrot and stick with which the IMF persuaded a succession of submissive governments to accept the deadly mix of prescriptions.

As part of its strategy to have the Philippine government accept its policy prescriptions, the IMF utilized the nation’s major economic functionaries, notably the debt negotiators, for the purpose, improperly inducing in them a behavioral pattern of double allegiance.

The continued existence of the foreign debt deprives the Philippines of its economic sovereignty so that as long as those debts are outstanding, the country continues to be subject to the onerous conditionalities of the IMF, leaving the government powerless to adopt an independent developmental strategy appropriate to the real needs of the nation — particularly the need to transform into a newly industrialized country.

The repercussions of the foreign debt and servicing thereof violate the basic human rights of the people to devise a socioeconomic system that would ensure full employment and enable them to lift themselves from a life of hunger and deprivation to which the IMF conditionalities have purposely condemned them.

The foreign debt is both the symbol of the nation’s enslavement as well as the weapon with which the IMF, described by Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad as "agents of the new colonialism," keeps the Filipino people enslaved and preserved in poverty and underdevelopment as the old colonialism did.

The Senate of the Philippines, as the proper highest policy-making body of the land, and which has the power of review over treaty commitments and agreements entered into by the Executive Department, now has the inescapable obligation to the Filipino people to initiate the process of debt repudiation through a resolution declaring it the sense of the chamber that the debt should be unilaterally repudiated.

The proposed Senate resolution should be transmitted to the United Nations along with a formal complaint against the IMF denouncing that body for having deliberately created the debt problem through policies that have transformed the Philippines — once the most promising and best performing economy in East Asia —into a humanitarian disaster.