Juan Mercado

October 13, 2004
Hunger-and building an overdue ark

"From food are born all creatures that live on earth. Afterwards, they live on food. And when they die, they return to food."
- The Upanishads

This ancient Indian text is reflected in Social Weather Station's (SWS) latest survey. Among other things, SWS found: Filipinos who had nothing to eat once a day - at least once in the last three months, rose to 15 percent - the highest since March 2001.

Hunger is most severe in Mindanao (23 percent). Metro Manila and the Visayas followed (13 percent), then Luzon (11 percent).
Except for the Visayas, hunger spread in all areas. Luzon and National Capital Region reported "new record highs."

"These are people of the broken plough, who bear the face of hunger," an Asian writer notes. "Men, women and children for whom it is almost too late."

Statistics rarely tell how chronic hidden hunger shatters lives and hopes. But periodic surveys spotlight the newest contours.
They permit comparison over time.

They can help strip away tunnel vision. Critical issues are often jammed within a narrow perspective: this administration's lifespan and that of the previous regime.

Hunger is rooted in our troubled past. And it will persist in an equally troubled future. At the rate nutrition improved over 11 years, "it will take half a century before we can eradicate malnutrition," wailed the fifth of six previous national nutrition surveys.

Conducted every five years, the sixth was released July. People then were transfixed on Iraqi terrorist hostage Angelo de la Cruz. But the new survey is more significant than one freed OFW hostage, Inquirer noted in "Invisble Hostages."

"More than 225 kids, below five, die every day due to preventable diseases stemming from malnutrition," the paper said. "It's like loading a jumbo jet daily with 225 toddlers, for a year, then crashing them into Batasan."

Four out of 10 pregnant women today are anemic. About the same number of mothers, who breastfed, are afflicted. "These dry statistics document a lethal cycle: the ill-fed give birth to wizened infants who, in their turn, will mother a generation of dwarfed babies."

Scrawny mothers often have premature babies who by age three will be stunted. Poor nutrition stunts about half (47 percent) of kids in Negros Occidental and Northern Samar, the 5th survey found.

Ill-fed kids will be deprived from "10 to 14 in intelligence quotients." Scientists call this "cognitive deficits," Asian Development Bank noted. That's mental capacity, as jokers put, "missing a few buttons on remote control."

The administration, meanwhile, floats a plan to distribute monthly P1.2 billion worth of food coupons to five million hungry families. Food stamps, targeted on the poor, worked in other countries. Here, a brawl brews. If funded and if politicians get a say in distribution, that guarantees failure.

Food stamps are band-aid. Needed are long-range policies that focus on basic questions. Who puts food on our tables? And how can they be helped?

Food is produced by farmers, who often till small slivers of land, and those who fish in our depleted waters.

"The people we ask to do this daunting job are the small (producers)," the late national scientist Dioscoro Umali told a United Nations Commission. "It is on the backs of these frail men and women, often cut off from mainstream programs, that we strap the task of producing our food. The peasant...has become the pack horse of civilization."

If there's to be an ark before the deluge, policies that empower producers must be swiftly adopted. These would range from credit, research, extension, to education, health and agrarian reform, among others.

Technology offers some answers. Unless matched with measures that increase incomes, elaborate programs or new tools avail for nothing. Increased food stocks are meaningless to a family that cannot buy it.

Unlocking the human potential remains the crucial question. This is a tension-filled issue. The poor today see that benefits are creamed off by elites. Skewed laws and structures block them off from making decisions that allocate resources.

As a result, they do not produce or conserve ecosystems. Why should they? They have no stake in merely redistributing hunger and penury.

Thanks to modern media, the poor see that their deprivation, stunted lives and premature graves are not inevitable. This knowledge unlocks aspirations of tremendous force.

Demands for long-postponed reform of a social order that vests a franchise on longer fuller lives in the affluent will erupt. "A poor and hungry people have nothing to lose by embracing strange causes," warns the Overseas Development Council.

Easing of penury is not a luxury. It is a condition of our survival as a human community. We should have no illusions that our safety margins are thinning.

"If your pour yourself out for the hungry, you shall raise up the foundation of many generations," the Sacred Writers tell us. "And you will be called...restorer of paths to dwell in."

(e-mail: juan_mercado@ pacific.net.ph)