Homesickness, long hours, and demanding employers—many Filipinos who migrate to another country for temporary employment make personal sacrifices and face daunting working conditions.

To their family members receiving much-needed supplemental income and to the Philippine government bolstering its foreign reserves, they are the “new heroes.” Remittances from Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs), as they are officially called, are now the country’s second largest source of foreign reserves, beating out foreign direct investment in terms of percentage of GDP. The government has even established an annual award to honor its most distinguished OFWs.

Marjorie Pajaron, the current Asia Health Policy Postdoctoral Fellow in Developing Asia, has been studying the significant economic benefit of OFW remittances to Philippine families and to the economy. She spoke recently with Shorenstein APARC about her research, which she will present at a seminar on May 9.

How many people from the Philippines are going abroad for temporary employment, and where are they finding work?

In 2008, OFWs numbered 2 million—representing 2 percent of the country’s total population. Fifty-one percent of these migrants were male, and 49 percent were female. Twenty percent went to Saudi Arabia; 14 percent to the Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Qatar, and Taiwan; 9 percent to Europe; and 8 percent to North and South America.

Where OFWs work depends on gender, education, and the type of employment. Many men go to the Middle East for construction-, mining-, and oil-related jobs. Women tend to go to Southeast and East Asia for caretaking and domestic jobs. In North America, most Filipino migrants work in professional jobs, including as nurses, doctors, and as other types of healthcare workers.

What is the “typical” profile of an Overseas Filipino Worker?

It often depends on the type of job. Healthcare professionals, for example, tend to be younger because they go abroad directly after graduation. Most of the nursing schools in the Philippines are linked to hospitals in the United States or Europe.

In general, overseas workers range from recent graduates to the median working age, from approximately 20 to 45 years old. Because of the large fixed cost associated with temporary overseas employment, families that are better off or who have the means to raise funds are those that are able to send family members abroad.

Most OFWs come from Manila or the surrounding urban areas. In the study I conducted, only 17 percent of rural households could afford to send a family member abroad. Usually several village families will pool together their resources, with the informal agreement that they will be repaid.

On average, male migrant remittances equal twice the amount sent by female migrants, who more frequently work in unskilled positions. For example, a well-educated man working in the Middle East in the construction and transportation industries earns higher than a woman working in a domestic position in Singapore. Some OFWs are overqualified in terms of education, but because of economic opportunity they decide to work abroad.

Do remittances provide short- or long-term economic benefits for families?

The benefits are both short and long term. Remittances can provide immediate assistance as needed, such as rebuilding after a natural disaster. From a longer-term perspective, many remittances in the Philippines go toward education, which is a form of human capital investment. Many families also invest in real estate, buying houses and land, and they also purchase durable goods, such as cars and appliances.

How do remittances benefit the country’s economy?

After exports, foreign remittances are actually the second largest source of foreign reserves in the Philippines. In 2006, remittances ranked even higher than foreign direct investment in terms of percentage of GDP. Some scholars have conjectured that OFWs have helped close the gap between the poor and the wealthy in the Philippines by contributing to a growing middle class. This is why migrant workers are called the “new heroes.” They sacrifice a lot by working in what are often unfavorable conditions. Because of the system of helping their families, they are also helping the entire country.

In your research, you have also looked at how rural farmers cope with natural disasters. What motivated you to study this issue, and what have you found based on recent years?

Farmers are the poorest of the poor in the Philippines, and since the country is in the Pacific Ring of Fire it is frequently hit by natural disasters, including earthquakes, typhoons, and drought. Filipino farmers are very vulnerable because most cannot afford to install irrigation. Instead, they have to depend on rain and their crops are continually susceptible to changes in the weather. There is limited government assistance available to them, and they do not have any formal insurance. In addition, they cannot take out loans because they do not have the collateral. So, I have been looking at how they survive after a natural disaster. The only possible explanation is that they depend on their networks of family and friends.

I had expected to find that they also depend on their family members abroad, but I have discovered that very few have been able to send relatives abroad in the first place. So this cannot be considered a reliable source of support. Instead, they seem to mainly rely on family members who have migrated to Manila and other cities.

There is much more work to be done on this issue. Studying how rural residents survive is important given they have limited access to formal credit, capital, and insurance markets; and government aid and transfers may also be limited or non-existent.

SPRIE welcomes Rustin Crandall as a full-time Administrative Associate and the newest member of our team. Rustin brings tremendous experience and a wide set of skills to his new role here with SPRIE at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In addition to working on the Silicon Valley Project, Rustin will be supporting SPRIE initiatives more broadly through his communications, organization, and IT expertise.

Prior to coming to Stanford, Rustin worked as an IT Coordinator for the Peace Corps in Guyana, a Program Coordinator for an international education and technology non-profit in New York, and a Product Manager for an Internet firm in the Philippines. Rustin holds a BA from UCLA and an MA from George Mason University.

You can reach Rustin at rustin.crandall@gsb.stanford.edu or 650.725.3703.

For several decades, Southeast Asia’s tracts of dense, old-growth rainforest have served as fertile ground for lumber, and much land has been converted to agriculture. Now, palm oil plantations are being planted where forests once stood.

In 2011, Indonesia, one of the region’s most prosperous countries, instituted a two-year moratorium on clearing new areas of forest, which is set to expire this May and has been criticized as having several loopholes. Other countries, including Cambodia and Myanmar, are losing forests rapidly.

Out of concern for climate change, international initiatives such as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) have aimed to promote conservation and sustainable development in countries with significant forest cover. But these efforts do not always support local needs, and can inadvertently have negative impacts.

Tim Forsyth, a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow, speaks about the gap between conservation efforts and economic and social development in Southeast Asia. He is visiting Stanford this quarter from the London School of Economics and Political Science where he is a reader in environment and development at the Department of International Development.

What major types of forest management do we see across Southeast Asia today?

A number of countries have put laws in place to restrict illegal logging, and have established national park areas. These are usually old-growth rainforests that restrict logging and agriculture. The problem with national parks is that they put so many restrictions on land use that the vulnerable populations living around them either suffer or are forced to cut other trees. I have spent some years working in poorer villages in Indonesia and Thailand on the edge of protected forests, and usually conservation policies avoid the fact that people need to get livelihoods somehow. Government policy should acknowledge how these people are vulnerable to changes in crop prices and the availability of land, or else these people might be forced into breaking the rules of national parks.

There is also production forest, which usually includes forest plantations. These can include softwoods such as pine, or hardwoods such as teak — and increasingly oil palm for food and biofuels. Forest plantations are attractive to governments and businesses because they earn money and can provide timber for construction and exports. Sometimes, plantations also gain carbon credits, although this is not a lot of money so far. In terms of conservation, destroying old-growth forest and replacing it with a monoculture plantation is not good for biodiversity. It also does not benefit those local people who want to harvest forest products or use part of the land for agriculture.

Finally, there are community forests that are supposed to be places where people can grow food, live, and have forest cover. The definition of “community forest,” however, varies from place to place. In Thailand, for example, the way the government defines it is not very different from a conservation area, and consequently there is not much space for agriculture. The Philippines, on the other hand, is more decentralized and local people can shape the nature of the forest landscape more. Corruption, however, is a problem.

Is there an ideal model that successfully supports sustainable development? How does your research approach this issue?

There has been much progress in collaborations that involve willing governments, international advisors, and local actors — often in accordance with an international agreement such as the Convention on Biological Diversity. These collaborations are more useful than a single actor working alone, and they acknowledge a wider range of objectives.

A new initiative is Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+). This is meant to encourage governments to slow down deforestation by rewarding them financially through carbon credits. But REDD+ has a number of challenges. The main problem is that the value of the credits is so low at the moment. REDD+ also overemphasizes forest cover, rather than forest quality. This means that if a satellite image of a country shows a lot of forest cover, that is good according to REDD+. But this gives no indication as to the biodiversity or the diversity of livelihoods inside a forest. It is a green light to all of the people who want fast-growing tree plantations, which makes them money and supplies them with wood for construction. In addition, it keeps a government happy because it supplies their country with timber and tax revenue, but this is not necessarily what you would call sustainable development.

There are elements of good models in different places, and it really depends on one’s viewpoint. Nepal offers a good example of community forestry because, in principle, it aims to engage local people more effectively and equally, and so can combine local development with the protection of national forests. From a development perspective, some forms of conservation can hurt poorer people and actually undermine conservation efforts. Therefore, in my work, I try to promote policy that acknowledges the needs of the more vulnerable populations. My research tries to make climate change policy more relevant to development processes in Southeast Asia. In my current project, I am seeing how policy recommendations about forests can be reshaped and reinterpreted locally in developing countries in order to address local interests. My goal is to understand how expert knowledge about climate change can be governed more effectively in order to enhance both development and conservation in Asia with better outcomes for everybody.

What can people do in their everyday lives to help combat climate change?

The practical problem of dealing with forest destruction and climate change in Southeast Asia is also a function of social and economic trends. As countries become more prosperous, more and more people live in megacities, drive cars, live in air-conditioned apartments, and frequent shopping malls.

A couple of years ago in Bangkok, I took lots of photographs of t-shirts printed with global warming messages and of people carrying reusable bags. When I was there recently, all of these things had disappeared. In other words, there is a tendency for people to think of conservation efforts as a fashion trend.

I do not think that any city in Asia is doing enough. We have to start planning cities in ways that use fewer greenhouse gases, and also to encourage people to realize that they can be real agents of change. At the moment, many urban citizens believe they can implement climate change policy by managing rural and forested landscapes. Instead, they need to realize the problems of these approaches, and to see what they can do themselves.