FINDING ANSWERS
Former Senator
Atty. Joey Lina
While it comes as no surprise, given the economic stranglehold inflicted by stringent lockdowns last year as the pandemic started to rage, the news that the Philippine economy suffered its worst so far is still quite shocking.
On Thursday last week, the Philippine Statistics Authority reported that the full year negative growth – with the local economy plunging by 9.5 percent as measured by Gross Domestic Product – was the steepest contraction in our country’s post-war history, based on data dating way back to 1947.
“The year 2020 will be remembered as the most difficult year in our lives,” according to Acting Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Karl Kendrick Chua who said quarantine restrictions severely cut household spending.
“The fall in consumption translates into a total income loss of around P1.04 trillion in 2020 or an average of around P2.8 billion per day. On a per capita basis, annual family income declined by some P23,000 per worker, but this average masks wide differences across sectors and jobs. Some workers were hit much harder, while others lost their jobs completely,” Chua explained.
It’s not surprising if the decline in consumer spending remains, given the current soaring prices of food items like pork, chicken, vegetables, and fruits., not to mention the joblessness and loss of livelihood due to the pandemic.
With prices of pork rising by around 55 percent and vegetables by a staggering 275 percent compared to last year, Agriculture Secretary William Dar said the country is now under a state of calamity due to “persistence of African swine fever in farms, the typhoons that devastated crops, and the alleged price manipulation among traders and resellers.”
Amid the skyrocketing prices of food is the reality that more Filipinos would go hungry. And it wouldn’t be surprising if the hunger rate might even exceed the all-time high of 30.7 percent among all the surveys done in the past 22 years by the Social Weather Stations. Last September, SWS said 7.6 million Filipino families went hungry.
“Hungry families doubled from 8.8 percent in December 2019 to 16.7 percent in early May, 2020, rose further by 14 points to 20.9 percent in early July, and then rose by another 10 points to 30.7 percent by mid-September,” SWS President Mahar Mangahas said.
Along with the rise in hunger rate is the rise in the rate of the various forms of malnutrition, particularly stunting and wasting, plaguing Filipino children. The data on stunting is disturbing: one in three Filipino children is irreversibly stunted by the age of 2 due to lack of nutritious food.
“Stunting in the first 1,000 days is associated with poorer performance in school, because malnutrition affects brain development, and also because malnourished children are more likely to get sick and miss school. Hidden hunger can cause blindness (vitamin A deficiency), impair learning (iodine deficiency), and increase the risk of a mother dying in childbirth (iron deficiency), a 2019 UNICEF report said.
Malnutrition can cause permanent widespread damage to a child’s growth, development, and well-being. “This disruption to children’s physical and cognitive development stays with them into adulthood, compromising their economic prospects and putting their futures at risk,” the UNICEF report added.
Thus, addressing widespread hunger and soaring prices of food items, while keeping people safe from COVID-19, is extremely urgent and of utmost concern – more than any other issue under the sun. Effective measures need to be put in place, sooner rather than later, to keep food prices not only from spiraling out of control, but to bring them down to manageable levels, especially for the poor who are hardest hit in these hard times.
And the necessary actions to combat the pandemic and soaring food prices must be performed not only by the national government, but also by local government units as well. I’ve often said that many solutions to national problems are local. Concerted efforts of both national agencies and LGUs would certainly go a long way in battling inflation and softening its impact.
LGUs can mobilize people to increase productivity and augment supply to lower prices of food. Former Agriculture Secretary Leonardo Montemayor, when he once guested in my Teleradyo program Sagot Ko ‘Yan, presented a brilliant idea: Promote urban agriculture which can do a lot to address the challenges pertaining to what he termed as “FPJ – food, pandemic health, and jobs.”
He said that when Cuba was suffering from widespread hunger resulting from the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the late 1980s, Cubans planted fruits and vegetables, and raised chickens in almost every place feasible – even in their apartments, rooftops, in balconies.
Mr. Montemayor said urban gardening should include ornamentals and herbs. Because herbal plants can boost one’s immunity, the risk of getting infected easily with the coronavirus is lessened.
LGUs can also establish and intensify the Food Always In The Home (FAITH) program that I created in 1995 when I was governor of Laguna. The highly successful program, which has since been adopted by the National Nutrition Council, enabled people to produce clean nutritious food in their backyards, thereby reducing home food costs by as much as 50 percent while improving family nutrition.
LGUs can also activate and strengthen local price monitoring councils, go after hoarders, profiteers, and other unscrupulous traders, especially those involved in cartels behind soaring prices of basic food items. And LGUs can also actively engage in a system like “Kadiwa” whereby farm produce are sourced directly from farmers and sold at lower prices than those handled by middlemen.
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