SOCIAL Weather Stations (SWS) Inc., the oldest and most reputable public opinion survey organization in the country, reported last week that "involuntary hunger" rose from 9.8 percent in September 2023 to 12.6 percent in December 2023. This is an increase of 2.8 percentage points! Coming as it did during the Christmas holidays, which Filipinos perceive to be a season of hope and blessings, this must have felt like a tragedy for affected families.
The SWS defines "involuntary hunger" as those families "experiencing hunger and not having access to food at least once in the past three months." It further categorizes this into two: "moderate hunger," which means those families who experienced hunger "only once" or a "few times" during the last three months," and "severe hunger," or those who experienced it "often" or "always" in the previous three months.
Out of the 12.6 percent who suffered "involuntary hunger," 11.2 percent fell under the "moderate hunger" category and 1.4 percent under the "severe hunger" bracket.
In addition, "involuntary hunger" in Luzon was the highest at 14.3 percent, followed by Metro Manila at 12.7 percent, Mindanao at 12 percent (which saw the highest rise from just 6.7 percent in September 2023), and the Visayas at 9.3 percent.
With hunger becoming a national scourge due to high food prices, it is no wonder that it has become a top concern of the public. A December poll by another survey organization, the OCTA Research group, found that 72 percent of respondents strongly felt the government should focus its attention on controlling the high prices of basic goods and services.
That rising food prices, or food inflation, are the biggest contributory factor to overall inflation is beyond doubt. When we tracked the share of food and non-alcoholic food beverages (one of the commodities used in measuring the consumer price index) to total inflation, we found that it averaged around 43 percent from 2001 to 2021. This worsened in 2022 and 2023 at nearly more than 45 percent and was 48.5 percent in 2023, almost half of total inflation!
With meager and limited income sources, high food prices serve as the single-biggest contributor to the high incidence of hunger and malnutrition among poor Filipinos. In fact, around 60 percent of the income of the poor goes to purchasing food. A 2018 World Food Programme study showed that even if 70 percent of their income is spent procuring food, it is still not enough to afford them access to nutritious food.
Expectedly, hunger and malnutrition in the Philippines are the highest compared to Southeast Asian peers. Stunting among Filipino kids 0-5 years old is almost 29 percent, the highest in the region. Malnutrition in the Philippines is nine times, 20 times, and 287 times higher compared to Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam, respectively.
Given the fact that 90 percent of a person's brain develops from 0-5 years of age, malnutrition at this stage will have a long-lasting impact on cognitive ability. It is no surprise that Filipino kids suffer from serious learning poverty; the vast majority of 10-year-olds can hardly read and understand what they read. School feeding programs cannot help because brain maldevelopment occurred prior to their entering schools. The intervention is too late to reverse the situation.
To bring down food prices, the solution is to produce more. That is what the law of supply and demand tells us. If supply is greater than demand, prices will fall. Conversely, if supply is short vis-à-vis demand, prices will rise. High food prices in the country can thus be unequivocally attributed to production shortfalls of agricultural and food commodities. A Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) report on the country's sufficiency ratio for various food commodities attests to this.
The obvious task is to raise farm productivity. The government, particularly the Department of Agriculture (DA), has launched various programs for many decades now to achieve this goal. In fact, it has established commodity-based programs (its budget is largely based on these), such as for rice, corn, livestock, and high-value crops, not to mention agencies for coconut, sugar and fisheries, yet sustainably raising the productivity of these products remains elusive.
As a result, the government is forced to allow the importation of products such as rice, corn, vegetable oil, sugar, fish, pork and poultry. This in turn incurs the ire of local producers and protectionists because they argue that enough domestic supply can be produced if given proper assistance by the government. Their list is quite long, but foremost of this is to maintain the country's high tariffs.
Sadly, high tariffs for agricultural products have been in existence for over 50 years now, and farm productivity remains low. This is in stark contrast to neighboring countries with robust agricultural sectors like Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, which gradually lowered their tariffs to promote greater competition and efficiency. In the meantime, as the debate rages on whether we should reduce tariffs to allow more food imports, malnutrition and hunger continue to ravage our people, especially our kids.
On another issue, PSA reported that our rice inventory as of Dec. 1, 2023, was at 1.9 million metric tons (MT), down 25.2 percent from 2.53 million MT last year. The DA must give us actual rice import arrivals (as per Customs data) and total rice inventory to allay fears that we are not going to experience a serious shortfall during the first quarter — considered lean months — of this year. It is also worrying not to have any estimate for the lean months of June to August given that the effect of El Niño is projected to be severe from May to June.
Issuing assurances that we have enough or ample supply of rice for the first half of the year will not be credible without citing official data on our actual rice supply and demand situation.
(fdadriano88@gmail.com)