Hungry in the age of plenty

By Julius D. Mariveles and Cong B. Corrales

GABRIEL Negre roasts cassava on an open fire in one of the haciendas or sugarcane plantations in Negros Occidental.

This is not an outdoor barbecue party. This is survival cooking. Gabriel earns only a little working the canefields. He says they cannot afford to buy rice everyday.

The Negres are among the many families who still lack food across this predominantly agricultural country and are among the 805 million who are hungry worldwide as we celebrate World Food Day today, October 16, 2014.

Thirty-five years since it was first celebrated, hunger pangs and grumblings of empty stomachs continue to echo around the globe.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reports that it is ironic that in a world of plenty, one in nine persons across the world live in chronic hunger.

In its report “The State of Food Insecurity in the World 2014,” the FAO says that the costs of hunger and malnutrition fall heavily on the most vulnerable and 60 percent of the hungry in the world are women.

In the same report, FAO’s key findings are: about 805 million people chronically undernourished in 2012-2014, and majority of the hungry live in developing countries, where over one in eight, or 13.5 percent of the population, remain chronically undernourished.

In another FAO statement, entitled: “100 days to Rio+20 100 facts,” FAO noted that although substantive progress was made in reducing chronic hunger in the 19802 and the first half of the 1990s, hunger incidence has been steadily rising for the past decade.

CLICK ON THE PHOTO TO READ SIDEBAR: ‘STARVING BUT WASTING’

“Almost 100 countries have been significantly affected by high food prices in recent years,” the FAO statement says in part.

This year’s theme is “Family Farming: Feeding the world, caring for the earth.”

The FAO notes that although marginal farmers and fisherfolk produce the bulk of the developing countries’ food basket, these sectors are generally poorer than the rest of the population of their respective countries.

“Although rapid urbanisation is taking place in many developing countries, farming populations in 2030 will not be much smaller than they are today,” the FAO statement on Farming Systems and Poverty reads in part.

“For the foreseeable future, therefore, dealing with poverty and hunger in much of the world means confronting the problems that small farmers and their families face in their daily struggle for survival,” it adds.

Here in the Philippines, poverty and hunger incidences also continue to soar inspite of the national government’s dole-out program — the Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT).

According to the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC), one in every four Filipinos live in poverty (19.1%) or an equivalent of 24.3 million Filipinos.

While this figure is three percent lower than the 2012 poverty statistics, it also means 19 of every 100 Filipino families do not have food security or are having a hard time accessing food.

The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA), in its official poverty statistics for the basic sectors for 2012, reports that five of the nine basic sectors have higher poverty incidence than the general population.

“(Five) of the (nine) basic sectors consisting of (fisherfolk), farmers, children, self-employed, and unpaid family workers and women have higher poverty incidence than the general population estimated at 25.2 percent in 2012,” National Statistician Lisa Grace S. Bersales said in the report.

Ironically, the basic sectors which actively contribute to the country’s food basket, year-in and year-out, are leading the pack.

It is not surprising then that in PSA’s latest report that the fisherfolk and farmer sectors “consistently” posted the highest poverty incidences among the nine basic sectors in the country in 2012 at 39.2 percent and 38.3 percent, respectively.

Released on July 4, this year, the report shows the estimates of poverty incidence for nine of the 14 basic sectors identified in Republic Act 8425 or the Social Reform and Poverty Alleviation Act by using the income and sectoral data from the merged Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES) and Labor Force Survey (LFS).

In the same report, the children’s sector ranked third as having the highest poverty incidence at 35.2 percent.

According to the Freedom from Hunger, in the urban areas of the country alone, more than 20 percent of the population—more than 15 million people—are considered undernourished.

“Close to one-third of Filipino children under five are moderately or severely underweight,” the Freedom from Hunger reports adding that the current statistics are “thought to be much worse in rural areas of the Philippines.”

The US-based group Save the Children noted in its report last year that while child mortality in the country has decreased significantly, the rate of chronic malnutrition among Filipino children under five years old “remains worryingly high.”

While the group lauded the Philippine government for being on track towards achieving the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goal 4 — reducing child deaths by two-thirds between 1990 and 2015 — persistent chronic malnutrition among Filipino children may negate this achievement.

“One in every three Filipino children remains malnourished,” the report reads in part.

Save the Children is an independent organization advocating the right of children in 120 countries worldwide. In 2012 alone, the organization was able to reach more than 560,000 Filipino children with its programs in health, nutrition, education, protection and child rights. Save the Children also helped in relief operations after the devastation wrought by super storm Haiyan in the central part of the Philippines last year.

World Food Day was first established in 1979 in honor of the creation of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations on October 16, 1945 in Quebec, Canada. It is commemorated every year by other organizations advocating for food security, including the World Food Programme (WFP) and the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD).