Amid rising dengue cases in Metro Manila, Barangay Addition Hills in Mandaluyong City came up with a bounty for mosquitoes and their larvae.
Specifically, the “May Piso sa Mosquito” campaign offers one peso for every five mosquitoes or mosquito larvae — dead or alive — brought to the barangay hall. They already installed a cube-shaped tank (with UV light in it) that can contain the insects.
Some residents have already gone to the barangay hall to surrender their mosquitoes and larvae. One of them got P9 as bounty, enough to buy instant coffee.
One barangay official said they’re going to stop the program once there’s evidence of a decline in dengue cases. But they stand ready to reintroduce the program if there’s a rise in dengue cases.
This is not exactly the first time that local leaders in the Philippines came up with a similar bounty for pests. If you recall, back in October 2020, Marikina City came up with a rat-for-cash program amid rising cases of leptospirosis.
I’m afraid, though, that Mandaluyong’s mosquitoes-for-cash program (like previous other bounties) is not as good as the officials had intended.
It’s a classic case of what’s known in economics as the “cobra effect.”
You see, back in the 1800s, there was a disturbing proliferation of cobras in Dehli, India. The British colonial government came up with a bounty for every dead cobra.
But rather than exterminate cobras, people came up with the ingenious workaround of breeding cobras to get more cash. The net result? An even greater population of cobras than they had before the program. Authorities stopped the program, and those who bred cobras let their cobras loose into the wild — thus bumping up the population.
Much more recently, in 2008, at Fort Benning in Georgia, USA, there was a problematic infestation of feral pigs. Fort Benning came up with a bounty of $40 for anyone bringing in a pig’s tail.
But researchers soon found that the population of feral pigs was nowhere near declining; in fact, it was rising. Not a few people bought pig’s tails from slaughterhouses, and surrendered those to the authorities. Fort Benning’s decision to hand out free feeds — so that hunters can lure in the pigs — only led to an over-nourishment of pigs, boosting their population growth.
The cobra effect extends well beyond pest control efforts.
In the Philippines, another good example is the number coding scheme, which started in 1995 (I remember that when I was a kid, it even used to be a color coding scheme).
For the uninitiated, the number coding scheme means that vehicles with plate numbers ending in certain numbers cannot be used during specific days of the week (Monday for plates ending in 1 and 2, Tuesdays for 3 and 4, and so on).
The objective of course is to help reduce traffic congestion. But many people, especially the rich, figured that one solution is to simply buy a second car so they can continue driving.
If enough people think this way, then there will be even more cars spilling out into our roads and streets (especially since many people can’t find proper parking slots for their extra vehicles). The program thus tends to contribute to congestion rather than abate it.
During the pandemic, we also saw several examples of the cobra effect.
In March 2021, the Quezon City local government provided incentives for law enforcement officers that issue ordinance violations for anyone enforcing health protocols.
In September that year, Parañaque City ordered that 20% of fines paid by violators of pandemic restrictions would be collected by the city treasurer and distributed “to authorized apprehending barangay officials or enforcers.”
I wouldn’t be surprised to know that such incentives nudged law enforcers to become a little more aggressive in implementing the pandemic protocols back then.
Just like many previous programs with perverse incentives, Mandaluyong’s recent mosquitoes-for-cash program will likely not end well. I don’t know if some people will actually find it worthwhile to breed mosquitoes (the returns are quite low, to be honest). But I won’t be totally surprised if some actually do this.
Needless to say, by breeding vectors for diseases like dengue, authorities might end up inadvertently causing more dengue cases than before, undermining their original (and otherwise well-intentioned) efforts to curb dengue.
Filipino government officials need to be more wary about the unintended consequences of their policies. As they say, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. – Rappler.com
JC Punongbayan, PhD is an assistant professor at the UP School of Economics and the author of False Nostalgia: The Marcos “Golden Age” Myths and How to Debunk Them. In 2024, he received The Outstanding Young Men (TOYM) Award for economics. Follow him on Instagram (@jcpunongbayan) and Usapang Econ Podcast.