4. Peasant Women, Foreign Debt, the IMF and the GATT. As in other Third World countries, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has a significant stranglehood on the Philippine political economy. IMF policies in the Philippines have not alleviated the situation of the poor. Instead, it has brought the Filipino people into a debt bondage: the Philippines keeps borrowing in order to pay what it has borrowed. Foreign debt increased from $599.5 million in 1965 to $34 billion in 1996, and was projected to increase to about $40 billion in 1997.¹². Servicing this debt takes resources out of the country, which otherwise could be used to generate jobs. For instance, 60% of Philippine export earnings goes to debt repayment (Santos and Lee 1989, 12); close to 40% of the national budget is allocated for debt servicing, and $13.451 billion went to interest payments in 1988-92 (Hildebrand 1991). Filipino labor is also being exported to raise foreign exchange to pay foreign debt. Over the last decade an annual average of approximately 700,000 overseas contract workers (OCWs) leave the country to provide cheap labor in North America, Europe, the Middle East and in the Asian new industrializing countries (Timson 1995, McGovern 1997d). Close to 60% of overseas contract workers are women, and most of them are relegated to domestic service work ¹³, where many experience exploitation from employers, such as physical and sexual abuse, work contract violations, and sometimes withholding of wages ¹⁴. Some government officials under the Ramos government call these migrant workers "modern day heroes" ¹⁵ because their dollar remittances pay the existing foreign debt and the loans to fund Philippines 2000. However, a peasant woman I met in Mindoro in May 1996, who had come back from domestic service work in Saudi Arabia and Taiwan, would rather call her experience as "slavery talaga" ("really slavery").

The negative impact of the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) policies on Philippine political economy is another major development issue that AMIHAN has publicly protested against. On July 1989 AMIHAN's National Council, comprising of peasant women delegates representing 22 AMIHAN local chapters, critically analyzed the Letter of Intent (LOI), which stipulates the conditions of the IMF and the World Bank for its loan package to the Philippines. The LOI took effect in 1989 and its provisions included the following: (a) lessening restrictions on imports, (b) deregulating prices of goods, (c) implementing an austerity program to save for foreign debt payment and servicing, and (d) attracting private foreign investment into Philippine economy.

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