Oldsters among the tennis fans could not help but recall the last time any Filipino mattered in that sport – when the "Mighty Mite", Felicisimo Ampon, all of five feet two inches, reached the round of sixteen at Wimbledon almost sixty years ago. In those days, Filipinos mattered in many other sports – matching skills, strengths, and stamina in basketball, football, baseball, track, and boxing with the best in Asia and sometimes even the world. Since then, the decline of Philippine sports has reached a point where we cannot even produce our own athletes to represent us in global competition – relying instead on "imports" or semi-Filipinos who grew up and trained abroad – to bolster our national teams.

Many sports fans blame the interference of politics and politicians in organized sports. Some would include the fact that business moguls have introduced their brand of capitalist management as well as profit-oriented values into sports organizations. Overlooked is the fact that the Filipino population, by the standards of international health, is woefully undernourished.

This column reported that last week’s issue of The Lancet, the respected British medical journal, carried an article that listed the Philippines as one of 20 countries that account for more than 80 percent of the world’s burden of under-nutrition. This means that more than 20 percent of Filipino children under five years old are considered as having stunted growth.

This week’s issue of the same journal published a report on the link between growth stunting and education. The data, from studies on almost a million children in Bangladesh and Indonesia, clearly showed that poorly educated parents are most likely to raise stunted children who in turn are less likely to do well in school and will then probably have stunted children. This is the classic cycle of poverty, ill-health and poor education.

Given the situation of poverty and hunger in the Philippines and the apparent apathy of the elite and the governments it has imposed on Filipinos for decades, it is no wonder that we cannot produce athletes of the caliber of Sharapova, Ivanovic, Djukovic, and Tsonga. But it seems that many of us are happy with producing beauty queens, singers, and other service providers.

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The Bureau of Food and Drugs has apparently accepted the fact that it is impotent and lacks the political will to impose a National Drug Policy on the wealthy and powerful stakeholders of the pharmaceutical sector. This defeatist mindset is a reflection of the weakness of the overall health sector. This is evident from the fact that, once again, the Department of Health has caved in to the pressure from pharmaceutical giants and the bullying tactics of medical professionals to strike down the proposed strengthening of the generic prescription provisions of the Generics Law of 1988.

This unfortunate occurrence highlights the fact that under this government, rational use of medicines for poor Filipinos is less important than the greed of commercial interests and the lust for power of professional groups.

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The spectacle at Davos last week once again emphasized the depths to which our benighted country has sunk in the eyes of the world. It was obvious throughout the proceedings that, despite our officials’ and participants’ posturing, the Philippines is only a bit player on the global economic stage. The country was not even mentioned in any of the great debates on international cable television and only our puny government station tried to make a big deal out of our participation.

For those concerned about poverty, it is just as well that we had a low profile at Davos. The Forum was simply a get-together of the world’s richest and greediest trying hard to pay lip service to the plight of Congolese while exploiting the Congo’s mineral resources, the difficulties of Darfurians while coveting Sudan’s oil, and the suffering of poor people all over the world while worrying more about protecting themselves from the consequences of their own wanton degradation of the planet’s environment.

A returning participant has proposed that the Philippines hold its own "Davao Philippine Economic Forum" with the participation of the country’s 40 richest individuals. This could be a good idea, if only to highlight the fact that the Philippines is completely controlled by a motley crew of so-called taipans, businessmen, old rich elite, and the rest of the 2 percent of the population who consume 90 percent of the country’s wealth.