Manila  - Amid grim prospects of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos losing their jobs because of the global economic downturn, the government is banking on sending more workers overseas to help ease a projected rise in unemployment at home.

The government has even started reviewing deployment bans to risky destinations such as Iraq, Lebanon and Nigeria to find alternative jobs for retrenched Filipino workers.

"We seek to lift the deployment bans on these countries in order to widen our overseas employment market in the light of the global economic crisis besetting us," Vice President Noli De Castro said.

An estimated 9 million Filipinos already work overseas, sending billions of dollars in remittances home every year that are one pillar of the domestic economy.

In 2008, remittances hit 16.42 billion dollars, up 13.7 per cent from 2007, which was stronger than expected, the central bank said.

Bank Governor Amando Tetango said remittances, which account for at least 10 per cent of the country's gross domestic product, "remain a dependable source of foreign exchange for the economy" amid the global financial crisis.

But with the economic slowdown affecting most of the major labour markets overseas, economists warned that remittances will suffer a slowdown this year as deployment decreases and laid-off workers return home.

A World Bank quarterly report in January said remittances were expected to remain resilient in the near term but projected that growth would likely slow to 4 per cent in
2009. It warned that "downside risks" were significant.

"In particular, if the global economic slowdown is more protracted than expected, the likelihood of cuts in OFWs increases," the report warned.

More than 5,400 OFWs, or overseas Filipino workers, have lost their jobs abroad since October and have come home, according to the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration.

The number of overseas workers who have lost their jobs could already be higher as some Filipinos have remained in their host countries in hopes of finding new work, labour experts said.

"OFWs are vulnerable to retrenchment regardless of their location and occupation," said Lito Soriano, chairman and chief executive of LBS e-Recruitment Solutions Corp.

Soriano added that some workers have lost their jobs even before they were deployed after companies postponed job orders amid uncertainty over how the financial crisis would affect their businesses while some countries have prioritized hiring their own citizens.

Locally, about 40,000 Filipinos have lost their jobs throughout the Philippines since October as multinational companies and export-oriented businesses closed shop.

The government fears the total number of retrenched Filipino workers locally and abroad could reach as many as 800,000 this year, Socio-Economic Planning Secretary Ralph Recto said.

In a bid to ensure that more employment opportunities are available for Filipinos, President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has ordered government agencies to set aside funds to hire contractual workers under a 7-billion-peso (148-million-dollar) jobs programme.

Arroyo has also directed officials to coordinate with private companies to identify areas where jobs could be generated.

But for many, the best alternative is overseas employment as demand for Filipino workers remained high abroad, even in countries where the Philippines has banned deployment and travel because of security risks.

In Iraq alone, about 10 million jobs were expected to be available starting this year for a new phase of its reconstruction, said the Iraqi charges d'affaires in Manila, Adel Mawlood Hamoudi al-Hakimh.

The Philippines imposed a ban on the deployment of workers to Iraq in 2004 after the kidnapping of a Filipino truck driver who was freed unharmed after the government withdrew its small humanitarian contingent from Iraq.

Despite the ban, 15,000 Filipinos have found work in Iraq.

The ban in Lebanon was imposed in 2006 after Israeli forces invaded the country. In 2007, deployment of workers to Nigeria was prohibited after a spate of kidnappings of Filipino workers.

De Castro said the government was already studying lifting the deployment bans in Iraq, Lebanon and Nigeria to give Filipinos more employment opportunities abroad.

He said a Department of Foreign Affairs team would be travelling to Iraq this month to assess the security situations in the three countries to determine if it was safe to resume deployments there.

"But of course, the safety and welfare of our OFWs far outweigh the economic effects," he said. "That's why the decision of lifting the bans will be exhaustively and carefully studied." (dpa)