The number of Filipinos going hungry has reached a record high during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the polling organization Social Weather Stations (SWS) found in its latest quarterly survey for September. The number has been going up since May, two months after Metro Manila and the rest of Luzon were locked down under an Enhanced Community Quarantine. SWS said that by September, 7.6 million households did not have enough food to eat at least once in the previous three months. Of these 7.6 million households, 2.2 million reported experiencing “severe hunger,” SWS said Last Tuesday, the World Bank (WB) reported the results of its own survey. It said some 2.7 million Filipinos will join the ranks of the poor in 2020 because of the triple shock of the pandemic, the loss of their jobs because of the restrictions imposed, and the series of destructive storms and typhoons. Our government’s own assessment was that the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) contracted by 10 percent in the first three quarters of this year. It went into technical recession in the second quarter when the GDP declined by 9 percent in the first six months of the year. The Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) – composed of the Department of Finance, Department of Budget and Management, National Economic and Development Authority, and Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas -- projects a deeper contraction of the economy of 8.5 to 9.5 percent by year’s end, as quarantines continue in various regions. The DBCC expects the economy to start recovering by 6.5 to 7.1 percent in 2021. These are the statistics of various economic organizations. Behind these numbers them are the lives of ordinary people some of whom we may have seen living in sidewalks at street corners. Every day they join long lines of other mostly homeless people to receive free meals from some organizations, like Rise against Hunger in the Philippines and the Catholic Church’s Society of the Divine Order. During the observance of World Food Day last October, Pope Francis said world hunger is caused to a large extent by the unequal distribution of the fruits of the earth, in addition to lack of investments in agriculture, climate change, and conflicts around the world. “We cannot remain insensitive or paralyzed,” he said, because “we are all responsible.” In this Christmas season, those who are fortunate enough to have done better than the families now suffering from hunger might want to share some of their good fortune, in food or in any other form, through charitable organizations or in any other way, with the families found by SWS to have joined the ranks of the hungry because of the pandemic. jhu