On my way home from the airport with a colleague last Thursday, the conversation drifted toward the exchange rate—the climbing dollar and the sinking peso—and how these abstract numbers finally hit the pavement for those of us living on a daily wage.
Our cab driver, George, a man in his 50s with a face lined by decades of navigating Davao’s streets, couldn’t help but weigh in. For him, the “exchange rate” was once just background noise, something he only heard about on the radio between songs. He doesn’t own dollars, he doesn’t shop at high-end malls, and he doesn’t have relatives abroad sending remittances to a Davao bank account.
“It’s only now,” he said, “that I realize how much those numbers actually matter.” He spoke with the quiet clarity of someone who has watched his daily earnings vanish into the fuel tank. What was once a vague economic concept has become a very real threat to his livelihood.
With the Philippine Peso sliding past ₱60.00 to $1.00, survival has changed for millions of daily wage earners.
In Davao, everything moves on wheels, from the pomelo crates coming out of Calinan to the commuters braving the rush hour on MacArthur Highway and now, CP Garcia Diversion Road. Since we buy our oil in U.S. dollars, a weak peso means we are hit twice: once by rising global oil prices and again by our own weakening currency.
George explained that he now shells out an additional ₱300 every day just to keep his tank running. It’s the reason why the streets of Davao feel different lately – instead of plying the usual routes hoping for a random flag-down, many cab drivers now spend hours in long, slow moving lines at malls and the airporfor a guaranteed fare.
That extra ₱300 is the “missing” three kilos of rice on his family’s table, or the kilo of chicken or fish that he can no longer afford to bring home.
For the sales clerk at a mall or the factory worker in Panacan, every peso added to the fare is a direct hit to a ₱481 daily minimum wage that is stretched thinner than a side-walk pancake.
Lenlen, a regular at the Bankerohan Public Market, has felt the shift at the rice stalls firsthand. She notes that as the price per kilo leaps by several pesos, her weekly budget no longer adds up. Instead of the usual five kilos she needs to feed her family for a week, she now heads home with only three. It is sad that even here in the agricultural heart of Mindanao, our rice prices are linked to global triggers and the costs of imports.
For a daily wage earner in Davao, a “savings buffer” is often a luxury they can no longer afford. For those who did manage to set aside a little for a rainy day, those emergency funds have been slowly bled dry by a cost of living that crept up on us almost invisible at first, but now staring us directly in the face with every trip to the market or the gas pump.
While economists in Manila talk about “macroeconomic stability,” the reality on the streets of Davao is much simpler. A weak peso is a silent thief. It steals a spoonful of rice here and a slice of fish there until our working-class families are left with nothing but wit and difficult choices.
We are all tied to this economic crisis, watching with a growing sense of dread as conflicts in the Middle East rage on and the global economy remains in a tailspin. It is time we look inward at what we have here in this “Garden of the Gods”—as our colonizers once described our land—and reclaim a sense of self-sufficiency.
While being self-reliant is certainly easier said than done, we can look back at the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic. We learned then that we could grow our own food and sustain our own neighborhoods when the world shut down.
As we pulled up to my home last Thursday, our conversation ended on a note of resilience. We realized that staving off hunger isn’t about waiting for the next government ayuda, it is about using our own creativity to survive and surpass a series of crises that show no sign of ending.
